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Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness, 1832–1869 (Berlioz 2) 1st Edition David Cairns
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.
BERLIOZ
TheMakingofanArtist1803–1832
‘One of the most insightful accounts we have of the making of a composer – and one of the most beautifully written. Indeed, in its investigation of character, its leisurely encompassing of a mass of social and historical detail, it reads less like a work of dry musicology than an early nineteenth-century French novel … Cairns has carefully revised the new edition to take in the latest scholarly findings’ Bryan Northcott, BBCMusicMagazine
‘A great subject, marinated for 30 years in amazing scholarship and love by an outstanding writer, flawlessly presented’ Diana Athill, OldieBooks of the Year
A full-scale new biography has long been needed, and now comes the first volume of David Cairns’s long-promised, exhaustively researched and detailed study of the composer. It has been worth the wait … I would not have the book a page shorter. Volume Two cannot come soon enough, for it is already clear that Cairns is doing for Berlioz what Ernest Newman did for Wagner’ Michael Kennedy, DailyTelegraph
‘Utterly captivating … The drama of Berlioz’s life makes him a rewarding subject for a biographer, and Mr Cairns rises confidently to the challenge … the research is as deep as the best historian’s, and the description of music is, to an amateur reader, as convincing as the best musicologist’s’ Economist
‘Cairns’s understanding of Berlioz rests upon a powerful imaginative identification with the man and his music as well as upon rigorous scholarship … with all this goes a vivid historical sense, fastening on the crucial detail while evoking the whole colour and flavour of nineteenth-century music-making and of the characters who peopled it … a book to set on the shelf beside Robert Gittings on Keats or Richard Holmes on Coleridge as a major biography of a romantic genius’ John Warrack, Gramophone
‘Ten years after the acclaimed first volume of his mammoth biography of Berlioz, David Cairns has finished the job in style … since reading these two volumes I have listened to Berlioz with new ears: a biographer can earn no higher tribute’ Raymond Deane, Irish Times
‘This double-barrelled biography has helped to shift the canon of Western musical taste’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent
‘One of the finest post-war biographies in English’ John Whitley, CountryLife
To Thomas, Daniel and Benjamin
List of Illustrations
p.xii: Berlioz c.1831–2: copy (by Boucher-Desnoyers) of a pen-andink drawing by Horace Vernet
1. A page from Dr Berlioz’s Livre de Raison (Guy Reboul-Berlioz Collection, St Germain en Laye)
2. Dr Berlioz: portrait, oil, by an unknown artist (Musée Hector Berlioz, La Côte St André)
3. a) Cherubini: chalk drawing by Ingres, c.1833–4 (Paris Conservatoire);
4. b) Rossini: caricature by Mailly, c.1850 (Richard Macnutt Collection);
5. c) Fétis: lithograph by Madou (Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels)
6. Mme Branchu as Didon in Piccinni’s opera: lithograph by A. Colin, 1824 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes)
7. Berlioz’s sisters: a) Adèle: portrait, oil, by an unknown artist
8. b) Nancy: lithograph by V. D. Cassien (both Musée Berlioz)
9. Letter of 6 April 1819 to Pleyel and co. (Pleyel Collection, Paris)
10. a) Quai des Orfèvres
11. b) Interior of the Paris Opéra: engravings by Pugin and Heath, ParisanditsEnvirons, London, 1831
12. Gluck: a) portrait, oil, by J. S. Duplessis, 1776 (Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Portraitsammlung, Vienna)
13. b) “D’une image, hélas, trop chérie” (IphigénieenTauride, Act 3): a page from Berlioz’s manuscript of extracts from the two Iphigénieoperas, copied in 1822 (Richard Macnutt Collection, Withyham)
14. Title-page of Berlioz’s manuscript full score of Iphigénieen Tauride, copied in 1824 (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York)
15. Le Sueur: engraving by Quenedey, 1818 (Richard Macnutt Collection)
16. Spontini: lithograph by Grevedon, 1830, inscribed by the composer (Musée Berlioz)
17. Letter of 31 August 1824 to Dr Berlioz (Guy Reboul-Berlioz Collection)
18. Charles Kemble and Harriet Smithson in RomeoandJuliet, Tomb Scene: lithograph by Francis, 1827 (V&A Picture Library)
19. A page from Berlioz’s Memoirsrecalling the performances of Hamletand RomeoandJulietin Paris in 1827 (Pierpont Morgan Library)
20. Beethoven: a) life mask by Franz Klein, 1812 (Beethovenhaus, Bonn)
21. b) “L’andante de la symphonie en la”: watercolour by Eugène Lami, 1840 (formerly André Meyer Collection, Paris)
22. EightScenesfromFaust: a) title-page of the full score, Paris, 1829
23. b) part of the autograph bassoon part for “The Tale of a Rat” and “The Tale of a Flea” (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département de la Musique)
24. A page of the autograph full score of Berlioz’s Cléopâtre (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département de la Musique)
25. a) Harriet Smithson as Ophelia, Hamlet, Act 4, scene 5: lithograph by Devéria and Boulanger, 1827
26. b) Marie Pleyel (Camille Moke) at the piano, woodcut by an unknown artist (Musées de la ville de Strasbourg)
27. Camille Moke: lithograph by Alophe, c.1831 (Richard Macnutt Collection)
28. a) Villa Medici, Rome
29. b) Mendelssohn: pencil drawing by Eduard Bendermann, 1833 (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin)
30. Italy: a) LandscapenearRomewiththePonteMolle, 1645, oil, by Claude Lorrain (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery)
31. b) ViewofOlevano, 1827, oil, by Jean-Baptiste Corot (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
33. Berlioz: undated drawing, possibly by Ingres (formerly ReboulBerlioz Collection)
34. Handbill for Berlioz’s concert of 9 December 1832 (Richard Macnutt Collection)
Thanks are due to the following for permission to reproduce the above-named illustrations: The Association Nationale Hector Berlioz (2, 7, 16), Guy Reboul-Berlioz (1, 17), Pleyel and co. (9), Oesterreichisches Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (12a), Richard Macnutt (13b, 15, 4b, 27, 34), The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (14, 19), The Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (6, 23b, 24), The Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, Paris (3a), The Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels (5c), The V&A Picture Library, London (18), The Beethovenhaus, Bonn (20a), The Musées de la ville de Strasbourg (26b), The Ente Provinciale per il Turismo di Roma (28a), The Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (29b), The Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and The Bridgeman Art Library (30a), The Ashmolean Museum and the Bridgeman Art Library (31b).
Berlioz c.1831–2: copy (by BoucherDesnoyers) of a pen-and-ink drawing by Horace Vernet
Preface
This book goes back to the winter of 1969–70, when Tom Rosenthal, then a director of Thames and Hudson, suggested that I follow up my edition of Berlioz’s Memoirsby writing a full-scale life. Tom was to prove an untiringly patient friend and ally and a vital source of encouragement throughout the years – more of them than either of us envisaged – between the inception of the project and the completion of its first part. He would have had to wait longer but for the generosity of Kern Holoman, chairman of the music department at the University of California, Davis, one of the world’s leading Berlioz scholars and himself engaged on a major life-and-works, who arranged for me to spend two terms in Davis as a visiting professor. Over a third of the book was drafted during this timely break in my career as a journalist. I also owe a profound debt of gratitude to Yvonne Reboul-Berlioz, who gave me unrestricted access to the large collection of family documents belonging to her late husband (a great-grandson of Berlioz’s sister Nancy) and made me welcome at her Paris apartment in the Rue du Ranelagh. It was in the many weeks spent going through the letters, diaries and account books of the Reboul Collection that I began to get a picture of the environment from which the composer sprang, and the idea of the book I should write about him first took shape. Despite having written his own story with a brilliance that no biographer can approach, Berlioz left a lot to be done. The Memoirs is a didactic work, not a confessional one. Its aim, as the author states, is to recount his career as an artist and the things in his personal life that influenced it and fed and shaped his art, to show what it is like trying to make one’s way as a composer in
contemporary France and to offer the young aspirant some useful hints. The book, a record and justification of his struggles, does not profess to give all the facts. There are many gaps in the tale.
This biography attempts to fill them. Nearly forty years have passed since the last large-scale work, Barzun’s pioneering and monumental BerliozandtheRomanticCentury, was published. In that time a great deal of new material has come to light. The Correspondancegénéraled’HectorBerlioznow nearing completion in Flammarion’s Nouvelle Bibliothèque Romantique includes several hundred letters previously unknown. At the same time specialist studies have been illuminating many obscure aspects of the composer’s career. Berlioz scholarship, responding to the recent revival and reappraisal of his music, is active as never before. All this and more I have tried to take account of.
The limits of the book should be stated. It includes no separate analysis of Berlioz’s music (and no musical examples). The works –the reason for writing a composer’s biography – are a dominant presence, but discussion of them is contained within the narrative of his life. It is a life, not a life-and-works. Nor is it a psycho-biography – this not so much from unwillingness as from want of the necessary competence. Maybe in falling in love at the age of twelve with a goddess-like young woman years older than himself Berlioz was projecting an image of the good mother he had not found in his infancy; and maybe when he dreamed he was defending his father from three kidnappers, and hacked off the forearms of two of them with a long knife, he was really expressing, among other things, his half-buried feelings of aggression against his father’s person and authority.1 But I have left such promising inquiries to others who have the skill.
What I have set out to do is simply to tell the story of Berlioz’s apprenticeship in greater detail than it has been told before; where possible, to visualize and explain each act and event, to show what happened and how and why, in this formative but least welldocumented part of his life, when the son of the village doctor,
brought up in a musical wilderness, was turning himself into the composer of the Fantastic Symphony.
If the innermost being of the man remains hidden, it can only be so. Creative geniuses are, finally, a mystery to those who are not. We follow them always a little way behind and rarely if ever see them for an instant full face. But there is no turning back once the quest has been embarked on.
Paris, Winchester, Davis, London, 1988
Preface to the Second Edition
I have taken the opportunity of Penguin UK’s republishing of Volume I of my Berliozto make a thorough revision of the book. At the same time I have added a passage on the lost Messe solennelle of 1824–5 (an autograph full score of which was discovered in 1991), and some little-known reminiscences of Berlioz by the actor Adolphe Laferrière, which give a glimpse of him during one of the obscurest periods of his early career.
Prologue
For a long time the music of Berlioz remained a sealed book to me. Each person comes to a particular composer in his or her own way and time; no rules govern the processes of musical discovery. But circumstances of cultural climate and environment may delay it. The more conditioned we are to the music we know, the more, unconsciously, we expect the unfamiliar to approximate to it. Bruckner’s formal designs are usually incomprehensible, to begin with, to someone accustomed to Brahms’s; and most people know Brahms’s symphonies before they encounter Bruckner’s. There are musicians and music-lovers who are drawn to Berlioz’s music irresistibly and for whom its idiosyncrasies of style are no barrier; in their deepest being it sounds a note of instant recognition. To many others it seems alien when they first hear it and perhaps for long afterwards, as it did to me. I was brought up from the age of eight or nine in the German tradition: first Bach, then a few years later Beethoven, finally Brahms. Composers not squarely in that tradition were assimilated with difficulty if at all. (Even Mozart seemed trivial.) I remember, one day when I was in my early twenties, my sister coming home in great excitement with a recording of the Fantastic Symphony that she had just heard. She insisted on my listening to it then and there. It made absolutely no sense to me. Nearly ten years passed before anything occurred to change this attitude. My musical tastes grew outwards from their Germanic centre but on the rare occasions when I heard any Berlioz I could make little of it. Then in 1957 Covent Garden produced TheTrojans. I went to the dress rehearsal and the première. Unlike many, bouleversésby the experience (the origin of the modern Berlioz revival), I was only partly persuaded. But had I not had to go abroad immediately after the first night I should certainly have returned to
Covent Garden for a later performance. For by then my interest had been aroused. Not long before, a cousin had played me the old 78 recording by Jean Planel of “Le repos de la sainte famille” from The ChildhoodofChristand had lent me the Memoirs(in the Everyman edition, with its racy, sympathetic translation by Katharine Boult). I was charmed by the strange sweetness and purity of the piece; and I was riveted by the book: the personality of the author intrigued and attracted me. I felt I must reconsider my rejection of his music and have another shot at it.
The opportunity came a few months later. The Chelsea Opera Group performed TheDamnationofFaust, under Meredith Davies. I played in the orchestra, in the percussion section. We had half a dozen rehearsals. Gradually, in the course of them, the barriers fell away and enlightenment dawned – until I realized with delight that the language which ten years before had been so much gibberish to my musical understanding had become familiar and made sense, thrilling, unimagined sense after all.
I give these personal details not simply to show how I became interested in Berlioz but as a means of illustrating the general problem his music poses. In a musical culture still predominantly Teutonic his language even now can take a lot of learning. For long, there were powerful extraneous factors which obstructed the process of learning it. The “Berlioz Problem” was a nineteenthcentury creation, but it lasted well into the twentieth. Musical opinion labelled him a freak; and in no area of human activity are received ideas more tenacious and myths harder to dispel. It became customary to think of him as a phenomenon uniquely eccentric and suigeneris, and of his admirers as a race apart.
To some extent the problem was that of all new music, dependent for its acceptance on conductors and musicians capable of mastering its technical and stylistic demands, so that the performances it receives communicate it faithfully and do not distort it beyond comprehension. But in the case of Berlioz the music remained new, never receiving regular enough performances to become familiar, and making technical and stylistic demands of a formidable kind. It was not so much that it exploited the most advanced instrumental
techniques and invented a few new ones as that it did so in the service of a style which musicians necessarily found hard to understand because its most prominent features were precisely those that the nineteenth century was in the process of forgetting: extended melody and complex, irregular rhythm. In an age dominated by Wagnerian harmonic polyphony, music based on opposite methods was wide open to misunderstanding. Its composer could only appear an outsider subject to no laws, and one whose methods were at odds with his aims. The two “sides” of his art, the Romantic and the Classical, were seen as the reflection of deep unresolved tensions in his nature, poles between which his magnetic but unstable genius flickered ungovernably.
During his lifetime attempts made to place him had led only to confusion. In the conservative mind he became associated with the deeply feared new movements in Germany, which were believed to imperil the very survival of music. This strange error helps to account for the extraordinary ferocity with which his French critics attacked him. Such an idea – Berlioz as disciple of Wagnerism –could have been thought up only in France. But there was a kind of excuse for it in the success he always seemed to be having with the Germans. In fact, if his works excited more response beyond the Rhine than in his native country, that was because there was a serious concert-going public in Germany, ready and curious to listen to new things, new styles and forms, and not because of any strong German affinities in his music. His roots were in France, in the music of French composers or composers who had been assimilated into the French tradition. But this cardinal truth was hidden, both by the novel aspects of his music and because the tradition was in rapid decline by the time he emerged as a composer to be reckoned with. Gluck, Spontini, Le Sueur, Méhul, Cherubini – they were his chief influences in the years when he was learning to speak with his own voice. A decade later they were passé.
Here is one source of the Berlioz legend. He had roots but they were concealed because the music from which they came had ceased to be familiar. People were conscious only of the strangeness of his style, combined with something disconcertingly old-fashioned.
In a musical society divided by rival factions, his music satisfied no one orthodoxy. To the academic establishment, always peculiarly narrow and rule-obsessed in France, it was unacceptable by reason of its disregard of the “principles of sound composition” – principles which Beethoven himself deserved the severest censure for flouting – and by reason of its restless modernity. But the modernists, though excited by it and in particular by its enrichment of the expressive possibilities of the orchestra, could not wholly accept it either: its antecedents, its whole bent, were too opposed to theirs. Berlioz and Wagner both set out from Beethoven (the discovery of whose music marked the final and decisive stage in Berlioz’s artistic formation); but they took quite different directions, and it was the Wagnerian that appeared to lead to the future. At the very moment when Wagner was writing his most advanced score, Tristanand Isolde, the score that was to have so great an influence on the music of the next fifty years, Berlioz was summing up his life’s work in a classical epic of the ancient world, steeped in the spirit of Gluck and Spontini, Claude Lorrain, Virgil – TheTrojans.When Berlioz went through the manuscript of Tristanwhich Wagner presented to him he found the harmonic idiom incomprehensible. Yet this same conservative, whose TreatiseonModernOrchestrationtakes a good third of its examples from the operas of Gluck composed seventy or eighty years earlier, can introduce the Treatisewith the latetwentieth-century watchword, “Any sound-producing body utilized by the composer is a musical instrument.”
Berlioz’s isolation should not be exaggerated. He had his admirers and champions, German, Russian and English, but French as well, to whom his music, “paradoxes” and all, spoke directly, without impediment. And so far from leading nowhere it was to influence composers as diverse as Bizet, the Russian Five, Mahler, Busoni and Stravinsky. But, as he himself recognized, his time had yet to come: “If I could only live till I am a hundred and forty, my musical life would become decidedly interesting.1” If much in his works sprang from a past already fading from memory when he first presented them, much was ahead of its time and awaited an age capable of
responding to it. Extended melody, harmony treated expressively rather than functionally (as in the Austro-German tradition), rhythmic innovation, form created afresh for the particular context, timbre and space as compositional elements, open orchestral textures, and a lean and lucid sound with no trace of the allpervasive instrument of nineteenth-century composition, the piano –such things had so to speak to be rediscovered before a style based on them could be at all widely understood. Above all it needed the advent of a retrospective age in which all epochs are potentially equal, all styles admissible, one thing is no longer judged by another, and the only laws a piece of music must be true to are its own. Modern culture’s comprehensive awareness of the past, its revival of more and more forgotten works, and at the same time the profound upheavals in musical composition, have between them virtually abolished the concept of a norm against which music such as Berlioz’s could be measured and found wanting. The historical factors that made him seem a freak have run their course. Thanks to much more frequent performance and to recording, his works are no longer more talked of than listened to. They have become familiar.
The classic case of the Berlioz score that everyone knew about and no one knew was TheTrojans.Its discovery, at Covent Garden in 1957, was correspondingly revelatory in its effect. At a stroke the whole picture changed. The significance of those performances was summed up at the time by Robert Collet in TheScore:
What seems immediately to have struck many people [ … ] was that this music was utterly different from the idea of Berlioz handed out to us by writers on music, and not only the stupid ones. Until very recently it was customary to hear quite knowledgeable musicians and amateurs talk of Berlioz as a wayward Byronic eccentric, with an interest in the orchestra that was unusual for his day, and an undoubted gift for musical grotesquerie, but otherwise a striking figure in musical history rather than a truly great composer. No one who has listened to The Trojans with even partial understanding can accept such a superficial and one-sided view any longer.2
He was speaking of musical opinion in Britain, a country with a tradition of interest in Berlioz going back to the composer’s visits to
London. But the consequences – of which the publication of the full score, more than a century after its composition, and the issue of a complete recording were only the most obvious – were to be felt far beyond Covent Garden.
The last few years have seen Berlioz the quondam bugbear of the professors become a respectable subject of academic research. Scholars have begun to examine his scores without prejudice and to find out what they contain and how they are written. The study of his compositional procedures now going on in American and British university music departments is bringing to recognition a composer radically different from the wild man of myth who composed by flashes of lightning and was great, if at all, by accident. It has become normal to treat him like other composers. Even a French critic might hesitate before expressing himself in the language and tone of Emile Vuillermoz in his Histoiredelamusique, published in 1939: “It is positively painful for a musician to have dealings with Berlioz’s music, with its slapdash writing, clumsy style and messy, chaotic methods of composition.”
The distinguished French musician Henry Barraud has declared that Vuillermoz’s pronouncements on music in general reveal an incompetence so profound as to render everything he wrote null and void.3 Yet it is not enough simply to dismiss such a passage as too extreme to bother about. Its hysteria may have something to tell us not merely about the writer but about the music that had so disagreeable an effect on him. The old received idea of Berlioz as subverter of artistic law and order continues to arouse feelings of insecurity. And not only the idea but the music itself, and notably its sense of violence: violence barely contained and sometimes bursting out with frightening force – what Berlioz’s contemporary the critic Blaze de Bury called “the smell of carnage that rises from some of his scores” (a quality critics found in the paintings of Delacroix), and that Colin Davis has described as his ability to “generate terror”.4 There is in his music, especially the music of his youth, an electrical atmosphere by which some people are unsettled as by certain kinds of weather. It is, maybe, as natural for one person to make him a
scapegoat as it is for another to identify with his heroic struggles and love him for his very humiliations.
Even when one takes him for himself and not as a symbol, there remain barriers. His is not consoling music. Its nerves are exposed. With all its ardours and exaltations it is disturbingly alive to the torments of human existence, outside and within. Its passionate sense of beauty carries an acute awareness of how frail and ephemeral beauty is. It understands the tragic limitations of life, the discrepancy between imagination and fact, the chaos that waits beyond the edge of civilization, the terror of isolation in an empty universe. There is a core of reserve at the heart of its most fiery intensities. You cannot wallow in it. It can be intoxicating, but to the spirit more than to the senses.
In this he differs from the Romantic composers who were his contemporaries. Their aims may have been similar to his; their methods are not. His art objectifies the emotions which inspire it. He stands apart, too, from most of his fellow-artists in France, the writers and painters. For all the similarities, he seems beside them a figure from an older time. He may share their postures and preoccupations, their literary enthusiasms, their beliefs, their subjects, their self-consciousness as artists, their attachment to the contrast of extremes, and their sense of the past. But his nostalgia is more deeply ingrained, more ancient. Again and again we hear in his music this note of antiquity: sometimes as a sadness “old as man’s weariness”, sometimes as a freshness from the youth of the world. It is this indefinable but unmistakable tone that made Heine compare him to “a colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle, such as we are told existed in primordial times”, and that a modern writer, Victor Gollancz, has defined as an “ache for an earlier, a kind of pre-moral beauty”.5, 6 The yearning for a golden age is no mere conventional pose with Berlioz; it is a condition of his existence. When, after writing his Virgilian epic TheTrojans, he said that he had spent his life “with that race of demigods”, he was stating the truth.7
Such an artist, compounded of such seeming opposites, could not have been other than problematical, just as his career as a
composer in mid-nineteenth-century Paris could only be a record of frustrations and unfulfilled hopes and the isolated triumphs which win a battle but not the war. Some have sought to explain the ill luck that seems to cling to him throughout his life, and to pursue him in death, by reference to malevolent destiny: he was “born under an evil star”, a “mauvaise étoile”. Others have interpreted it as selfinduced, the projection of inner contradictions: Berlioz was the author of his own misfortunes. But the explanation is simpler. Certainly his music would have created difficulties – of comprehension, interpretation, performance – whatever age he had lived in. Like biblical man he was “born to trouble as the sparks fly upward”.8 But the problem was exacerbated by history. And, French to the marrow though he was, he chose the worst possible age and environment to live in. “What the devil was the Good Lord thinking of when he had me born in ‘this pleasant land of France’?” His cridu coeursays it all.9 The contradictions were between an artist of his ideals and the values and organization of musical culture in contemporary Paris: and the outcome was inevitable. It was no accident that the two chief roads to success, the Opéra and the Conservatoire, were both barred to him; no accident that the spiritual heir of eighteenth-century tragédie-lyrique, who had been brought up to believe that the theatre was the natural goal of a composer, composed fewer than half a dozen operas, only one of which was commissioned by a Paris opera house; no accident that the greatest French composer between Rameau and Debussy remained outside the establishment; that the finest conductor of his time was passed over in favour of lesser talents whenever there was a post to be filled; that the Société des Concerts performed his music on only two occasions in the first thirty-five years of its prestigious existence; that he obtained no settled position in French musical life; that in consequence he had to fight every inch of the way, hardly ever enjoying the freedom he needed, forced to dissipate his energies on peripheral activities; and that in the end the struggle wore out his resilient spirit and the repression of his
creative fires burned him up, silencing his eager genius at its height.10, 11
Ernest Newman, surveying the obstacles that Berlioz had to battle against throughout his career, concluded that “the work he actually did [ … ] seems only the more wonderful”.12 True: TheTrojans, the Requiem, Nuitsd’été,TheDamnationofFaust,TheChildhoodof Christ, the Fantastic Symphony, exist; and they have never been more widely performed and more clearly understood. But when we consider what he might have done in other circumstances, and the works that were fated to remain locked in his imagination, never to receive form, how can we think of his life as other than tragic?
The Green and Golden Plain
The young genius from the provinces who comes to Paris with his originality unstifled by the weight of the past is a prominent theme of French nineteenth-century culture, celebrated in the writings of Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert among others.1 In that respect Berlioz was one of a numerous company.
Early environment provided, in however unlikely a form, a friendly climate for the seed that had been implanted in him. Where the seed came from remains a mystery. We cannot account for the upsurge of creativity in a well-to-do provincial family after generations of solid, unremarkable men of affairs. Ancestry explains him as little as it explains most exceptional spirits, though not for want of trying. Various notions have been advanced. The presence of noble and knightly Berliozes in crusader rolls of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has been held to prefigure the man’s essentially aristocratic cast of mind.2 There has been much speculation about the physiognomy and the termination-oz: the aquiline nose and the incidence of the name in Savoy are thought to indicate an Italian origin.3 Traces of the name have also been found in Naples; nor should it be forgotten that there was a Neapolitan colony in Grenoble, not to mention the bands of Italian mercenaries that
roamed the region in the sixteenth century.4 On the other hand it is noted that on his mother’s side he descended from a line of Austrian counts of very warlike appointment.5 Even the ancient world and the Greek inheritance have been pressed into service: for what does the combination of blue eyes and red hair suggest (if indeed his hair was red, about which there is doubt) if not a throwback to some ancestral Thracian colonist of the western Mediterranean? Anything rather than that a great composer should be French.6
Equally, it gets us only so far if we interpret his advent in quasibiological terms as the culmination of several vigorous and prolific generations (his father was one of eleven children, his grandfather one of nineteen, his great-grandfather one of fifteen, and the average age at death of his six previous ancestors in the male line was over seventy). Nor can we do more than register the fact that the five years of the Consulate, 1799 to 1804, as though by an unleashing of genetic energy accumulated in the turmoil of the French Revolution and its wars, saw the birth in turn of Balzac, Delacroix, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Berlioz, and George Sand. It is a fabulous concentration of talent; but it cannot be accounted for, except in the most imprecise and metaphorical terms.
What can be said is that by the beginning of the nineteenth century the Berlioz family had evolved to a point where its environment favoured the cultivation of a certain kind of intelligence and the development of the imagination. Hector Berlioz had behind him two generations of professional men. Before that, the family had been involved for at least a century and a half in commerce. The earliest direct forebear named in the brief family history written by Dr Berlioz, Hector’s father, is Claude Berlioz, merchant tanner of La Côte St André, who was born in about 1590 and who willed that his remains “be interred in the tomb of his ancestors”; he was “rich by the standards of his time, since he bequeathed his daughter Jeanne 550 [livres] over and above her marriage settlement”, but “was unable to sign his will, being illiterate”.7
Until the middle of the eighteenth century the male offspring, when they were not priests or monks, had continued to be
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Title: La faune des plateaux
Author: Tristan Bernard
Release date: November 22, 2023 [eBook #72205]
Language: French
Original publication: Paris: Flammarion, 1923
Credits: Laurent Vogel (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica)) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LA FAUNE DES PLATEAUX ***
TRISTAN BERNARD
La faune des plateaux
PARIS
ERNEST FLAMMARION, EDITEUR
20, RUE RACINE, 20
Tous droits de traduction, d’adaptation et de reproduction réservés pour tous les pays
Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage : quinze exemplaires sur papier de Hollande numérotés de 1 à 15 et vingt exemplaires sur papier vergé pur fil Lafuma numérotés de 16 à 35
DU MÊME AUTEUR
Chez le même éditeur :
CORINNE ET CORENTIN, roman.
LE JEU DE MASSACRE
L’ENFANT PRODIGUE DU VÉSINET, roman.
LE POIL CIVIL (Gazette d’un immobilisé pendant la guerre).
LE TAXI FANTÔME.
Chez d’autres éditeurs :
VOUS M’EN DIREZ TANT ! nouvelles (avec Pierre Veber).
CONTES DE PANTRUCHE ET D’AILLEURS, nouvelles.
MÉMOIRES D’UN JEUNE HOMME RANGÉ, roman.
UN MARI PACIFIQUE, roman.
SOUS TOUTES RÉSERVES, nouvelles.
DEUX AMATEURS DE FEMMES, roman.
SECRETS D’ÉTAT, roman.
NICOLAS BERGÈRE, roman.
MATHILDE ET SES MITAINES, roman.
Essais et nouvelles :
AMANTS ET VOLEURS.
CITOYENS, ANIMAUX, PHÉNOMÈNES.
LES VEILLÉES DU CHAUFFEUR
SUR LES GRANDS CHEMINS
SOUVENIRS ÉPARS D’UN ANCIEN CAVALIER.
THÉATRE COMPLET (t. I, II et III parus).
Pièces éditées séparément :
LE FARDEAU DE LA LIBERTÉ
LES PIEDS NICKELÉS.
ALLEZ, MESSIEURS.
L’ANGLAIS TEL QU’ON LE PARLE.
LE NÉGOCIANT DE BESANÇON
JE VAIS M’EN ALLER
LES COTEAUX DU MÉDOC.
LE VRAI COURAGE.
LE CAMBRIOLEUR
UNE AIMABLE LINGÈRE
LE CAPTIF.
SILVÉRIE OU LES FONDS HOLLANDAIS (avec Alphonse Allais).
LE PETIT CAFÉ.
TRIPLEPATTE (avec André Godfernaux).
LE PEINTRE EXIGEANT
Droits de traduction et de reproduction réservés pour tous les pays.
Copyright 1923, by E F .
Une variété d’auteur
Le directeur est à l’avant-scène. Il a posé une chaise contre la rampe. A côté de lui, un homme tient le manuscrit et, stoïque sous mille invectives, souffle leur rôle aux acteurs. C’est un personnage aux cheveux bouclés, de vingt-cinq à soixante-dix ans, et dont on ne sait s’il est un noble ruiné ou un prolétaire non enrichi.
La répétition est commencée depuis une heure pour le quart. A deux heures et demie arrive un homme pesant, à qui le directeur tend une main distraite, sans le regarder, et qui prend place également à l’avant-scène sur une chaise avancée à la hâte par le deuxième régisseur. L’auteur — car c’est lui — a pris un air migraineux pour excuser son retard. Mais personne ne lui demande d’explication, cet incident n’ayant rien d’exceptionnel.
Il met un pince-nez pour suivre attentivement la répétition, darde un regard perçant sur les protagonistes, mais n’écoute pas un mot de ce qu’ils disent et se demande anxieusement quel prétexte de thérapeutique il va trouver pour s’en aller à quatre heures…
Non pas qu’il se désintéresse du sort de la pièce que l’on répète. Mais il sait qu’il y a encore trois semaines de répétitions, c’est-à-dire une éternité.
Il se lève et dit au directeur à voix basse :
« Je vous quitterai dans une heure, j’ai un rendez-vous chez mon notaire… » Le directeur lui fait un signe d’acquiescement qui ne veut
rien dire, et attirant son attention sur la scène que l’on répète : « Regardez-moi ça. Il y a un trou… Il ne peut pas lui dire ce qu’il lui raconte, s’il n’est rassuré sur le sort de l’enfant. »
L’auteur réfléchit sans penser à rien, puis déclare : « Vous avez raison. J’arrangerai ça.
« — Il faudrait l’arranger tout de suite, dit le despotique directeur. Autrement, ils ne l’apprendront pas…
« — Je ne peux pas improviser un texte. Ce n’est pas du travail sérieux… »
Sur l’ordre du directeur, on installe l’écrivain dans le bureau de la régie.
« Tâchez de me donner une plume qui marche », dit-il avec autorité au régisseur. Il sait que toutes les plumes du théâtre sont rétives. Mais ce jour-là, c’est un fait exprès, on lui donne une plume excellente.
« Surtout qu’on ne me dérange pas ! »
On ferme la porte, mais elle est vitrée, et il faut changer un peu la position du fauteuil, de façon à tourner le dos à la vitre. Ainsi, la tête inclinée sur la poitrine par l’engourdissement d’une digestion un peu lourde donnera aux indiscrets du couloir l’impression d’une attitude méditative.
D’autres fois, l’auteur alléguera qu’il veut écouter la pièce de la salle, et il s’installera, pour méditer, au fond d’une baignoire obscure.
En somme, c’est un travailleur sérieux, qui ne veut travailler qu’à tête reposée. Mais il n’est pas sûr que, dans le théâtre, on ait cette opinion de lui. N’y a-t-il pas un peu d’ironie dans le respect que l’on témoigne à son labeur ? Aurait-on l’irrévérence de le soupçonner de paresse ? Ces gens-là ne le comprennent pas. C’est un artiste libre, et qui ne veut travailler qu’à ses heures. Ces heures sont-elles fréquentes ? Voilà qui ne vous regarde pas.
Un numéro bien agréable
La générale n’aura lieu que le mois prochain, et ce n’est pas encore le moment du coup de feu. Il n’y a donc personne sur le plateau à une heure vingt, bien que la répétition soit à une heure pour le quart…
Si, tout de même, il y a quelqu’un, qui est là depuis dix minutes.
C’est l’auteur, qui s’abrite dans l’ombre. Il ne veut pas avoir l’air d’être arrivé trop tôt. Il n’ose pas s’emporter contre les retardataires. Il masque son énervement sous une politesse douloureuse.
Enfin, voici un accessoiriste. L’auteur a quelque chose à lui dire. Il a des observations prêtes pour tout le monde…
— Vous êtes-vous procuré le calepin pour le deux ?… Il faut que Saint-Gaston joue avec dès maintenant, afin de l’avoir bien dans la main…
Mais déjà il s’est précipité vers une vieille personne qui semble aveugle et qui tâtonne pour trouver sa chaise. C’est la souffleuse, une femme distinguée, dont on aimerait avoir l’avis sur les pièces qu’elle souffle. Or, elle n’en parle jamais… (Peut-être les chefsd’œuvre perdent-ils leur saveur à être ainsi émiettés mot par mot ?)
— Madame, lui dit l’auteur, pensez bien à envoyer à Jenny le « Bien joué, Alfred ! » du premier acte. Hier, elle l’a attendu. Et ça loupe le mouvement…
… Ah ! le chef machiniste !
…
Dites donc, Grosguillaume, le décor du deux que vous nous avez présenté hier, est-ce qu’il n’est pas un peu dur à équiper ? Vous savez qu’il me faut des entr’actes de dix minutes, pas plus. Autrement tout fiche le camp !
Mais voici qu’Il apparaît sur le plateau, Lui, le Directeur, le Patron, le Capitaine, le Maître avant Dieu…
L’auteur lui parle de la date. Si le directeur est pressé et veut passer le plus tôt possible, l’auteur dit en gémissant que la pièce est difficile et qu’il faut avoir le texte bien dans la bouche une bonne semaine avant la première… Si le directeur a le temps d’attendre et déclare qu’il ne passera pas avant trois semaines, c’est à l’auteur d’être impatient, pour mille raisons : il faudrait passer pour le Salon de l’Aéro… la pièce ne doit pas être répétée trop longtemps, afin que les interprètes ne s’en fatiguent pas et gardent leur fraîcheur d’impression…
Ce n’est pas que l’auteur ait l’esprit de contradiction… Mais il est inquiet… Il suffit qu’on l’engage dans un parti très net pour qu’il en craigne les conséquences. Alors il fait contrepoids de toutes ses forces en faveur du parti contraire, jusqu’au moment où l’on se range à son avis : il n’en faut pas plus pour le faire passer dans l’autre camp.
Après avoir conseillé au jeune premier, à la répétition de la veille, d’insister sur un sourire ironique, il se dit tout à coup que cette indication peut être dangereuse et il essaie maintenant de ramener son interprète à plus de naïveté… Hier, il a dit à l’ingénue qu’elle pleurait trop. Maintenant, il craint qu’elle ne soit un peu sèche.
Le secrétaire du théâtre traverse le fond de la scène. Ce n’est pas encore le moment de faire le service de générale. Mais l’auteur lui rappelle pour la septième fois qu’il lui faudra deux avant-scènes… Et puis cette recommandation qu’il oubliait pour les notes de publicité…
Tout ce qu’il fait là, ce n’est pas pour embêter le monde. Mais il a beaucoup de soucis et veut les faire partager à son prochain. Et puis, vraiment, on est à la veille d’un grand événement qui doit
révolutionner le globe, la première de son œuvre ! Il ne peut supporter que l’on soit calme… Car s’il est doux de ne pas s’en faire quand tout s’agite autour de vous, il est révoltant de voir des gens qui ne s’en font pas, autour de votre âme agitée…
Le Maître
C’est un auteur célèbre.
On l’appelle maître et il mérite magnifiquement ce titre, car il est désormais incapable de s’instruire.
Depuis trente ans, ses qualités sont toujours les mêmes et de plus en plus perfectionnées et pures… mais il n’a plus de défauts… Il ne commet, hélas ! plus d’erreurs.
Quand il commence une pièce, il sait où il va. Presque tous les spectateurs le savent aussi.
Le vieux Louis XIV disait : « On n’est plus heureux à notre âge. » Le secours de la vénérable expérience a remplacé la collaboration du jeune Hasard. Jadis, un poète eût comparé notre dramaturge à une auto vagabonde, trop rapide, d’allure trop saccadée, aux freins insuffisants et qui capotait parfois dans les fossés.
Maintenant le même poète le regarderait comme un tramway somptueux qui accomplit implacablement son itinéraire sur des rails solides.
Le maître n’écrirait plus un ouvrage dont il ne serait pas entièrement satisfait. Il est sûr de ce qu’il écrit. L’équilibre de son œuvre lui donne une satisfaction intérieure qui peut-être n’est pas fatalement partagée par les personnes du dehors.
Sur le plateau, il est entouré d’une admiration universelle, un peu goguenarde chez le petit personnel qui le regarde comme un
personnage surnaturel, mais légèrement infirme et gâteux.
Les jeunes femmes du théâtre le considèrent avec respect. Il lui est difficile de frayer avec elles comme il en a sans doute le secret désir… Comment descendrait-il de son pavois ?
Il n’a pas, comme jadis Jupiter, la ressource de l’incognito et ne peut adopter, pour rassurer ses partenaires, le dandysme onduleux du cygne ou la franche simplicité du taureau campagnard.
Quand il a lu sa pièce aux artistes, ils l’ont écoutée en silence et des applaudissements résolus ont salué la fin de chaque acte ; c’est qu’on est tranquille et que le jugement de chacun est à l’abri ; on est certain que la pièce est belle, étant signée de lui.
Puis, les répétitions se prolongent. A force de vivre avec le chefd’œuvre monstrueux, on s’est familiarisé et la terreur admirative décroît à vue d’œil.
Le jour de la générale, il peut arriver que le public médusé acclame la pièce du bon maître. Alors tout le personnel du théâtre retrouvera son admiration. Ou bien la salle sera consternée. Alors on décidera que le maître est en déclin.
Dans ce cas, il aura toujours la ressource de se dire que la générale rend des jugements de première instance et que l’appel n’interviendra que des années après.
Il pourrait se dire cela aussi, et peut-être plus justement, s’il obtient un triomphe, car l’acclamation, en présence d’une œuvre nouvelle, est encore plus sujette à caution que le dénigrement. Mais, dans ce cas, comment ne pas encaisser le jugement et ne pas l’estimer définitif ?
Le Criminel
— Vous comprenez, monsieur l’inspecteur, si je vous ai demandé au commissariat, c’est que je ne veux pas être exposée à des ennuis. Il y a deux ans, l’on m’a fait des reproches qui m’ont joliment tourmentée, la fois que je n’ai pas averti pour l’assassin de la rue Pigalle, qui était venu ici dans la maison, comme on l’a su après par l’enquête. Il avait des manières qui pouvaient donner la suspicion, je le veux bien, mais de là à se figurer ce qu’il était !… Celui d’aujourd’hui est assurément bien plus bizarre… J’ai lu encore ce matin, sur le journal, un forfait de vol dans une bijouterie… Ça m’a saisie, quand la personne qu’est avec lui est sortie un instant de la chambre pour me raconter ce qu’elle avait été à même de remarquer…
— C’est après déjeuner qu’il est venu ?
— Un peu avant trois heures. Il y a une heure de cela… Il a demandé une de ces dames sans trop choisir, et commandé du champagne… Il paraît qu’il ne tient pas en place dans la chambre, parlant, parlant, sans finir ses phrases, posant des questions et n’écoutant pas les réponses. « Y a-t-il longtemps que t’es ici ? » ou bien : « Raconte-moi comment t’as commencé ? » Tout ça pour causer, comme pour s’étourdir… Mais on voit bien que ça ne lui change pas les idées…
L’inspecteur dit qu’il n’y avait pas de présomptions suffisantes pour arrêter un homme, mais qu’on pouvait toujours le prendre en
filature. Il avait d’ailleurs amené un camarade, qui l’attendait en bas. Lui-même descendit aussi, et alla flâner sur le trottoir. On convint d’un signal de rideau à une fenêtre, quand le type descendrait à son tour.
Vers cinq heures moins le quart, le type sortit. C’était un homme assez élégant, entre deux âges, ni grand ni petit. Il ne donnait pas de signes d’agitation. Mais les hommes de police ne s’y trompèrent pas : son allure était saccadée, et il serrait les dents. Il marcha pendant dix minutes, assez vite, puis, arrivé à un coin de rue, il s’arrêta, parut hésiter, s’engagea dans une petite ruelle, bordée de vieilles et sordides maisons. Les inspecteurs ne le suivirent pas tout de suite, pour ne pas se faire repérer… Mais, à trois maisons de là, l’individu entra dans une allée.
Au-dessus de la porte, un écriteau : Entrée des artistes. Les inspecteurs montèrent carrément l’escalier. Le palier était envahi par des gens. Le type était au milieu de cette foule. On l’entourait, on lui pressait les mains, on l’embrassait…
— Mon vieux, tu n’as jamais rien fait d’aussi beau. — Quelle conception et quelle exécution ! — C’est la plus belle générale depuis la guerre ! Ça se jouera deux ans ! — Mais qu’est-ce que tu fichais pendant les entr’actes ? On t’a cherché partout…
Le Secrétaire Général
Le secrétaire général apparaît sur le plateau pendant la répétition, pour dire un mot au directeur. Si celui-ci est occupé à régler une scène, il attend que le patron ait fini et semble suivre pendant quelques instants le travail… C’est encore un sujet de déception pour l’auteur, car il est rare que cet auditeur lui dise : « Ah ! que c’est beau ! » Évidemment aussi, il est difficile d’apprécier une pièce sur quelques répliques… Mais l’auteur comprend mal qu’on puisse approcher de son chef-d’œuvre sans en être ébloui. Sa pièce est une pièce de drap d’or, dont chaque échantillon doit susciter une admiration impossible à taire.
Au fond, bien que le secrétaire général soit un homme de lettres, les pièces jouées sur ce théâtre ne l’intéressent pas. Il dit bien à l’auteur : « Je n’ai pu assister à la lecture, mais je vous applaudirai à la générale. » Ce n’est pas vrai. Il sera encore au contrôle une demiheure après le lever du rideau, d’abord parce que c’est dans ses attributions et ensuite parce qu’il aime mieux ça.
Quelques jours avant le grand jour, il a déclaré qu’il était accablé de demandes de places et que le théâtre était trop petit de moitié. « Ah ! vous pouvez dire que votre pièce est attendue ! », telle est la phrase qu’il sert invariablement à tous les auteurs, cependant que ceux-ci se lamentent parce que les annonces ont été mal faites et que le grand événement leur semble rester inaperçu… Tout à l’heure encore, en venant à pied au théâtre, l’auteur a croisé des passants
uniquement occupés de leurs affaires, et des boutiquiers qui causaient sur le pas de leur porte de toute autre chose que du fait historique en préparation.
Le secrétaire a remis à l’auteur un paquet considérable pour son service de première et de générale… L’auteur dit à peine merci, car il sait ce que contient cet énorme pli : quelques rares fauteuils d’orchestre, des balcons de troisième rang de côté, pour des personnes presbytes qui n’ont pas peur du torticolis, et des places de foyer et de troisième galerie pour ceux des amis d’enfance, fournisseurs et petits créanciers qui ne sont pas sujets au vertige.
L’auteur aborde le secrétaire dans son bureau et, selon son tempérament, hurle ou gémit… Le secrétaire, pour toute réponse, lui montre la feuille de générale toute noircie de noms. Il énumère les servitudes du théâtre, les bailleurs de fonds, la vieille propriétaire de quatre-vingt-onze ans, la longue (et lourde) chaîne des souslocataires, les avocats, avoués, marchands d’autos de la maison…
Le secrétaire répète une fois de plus que son métier est infernal… Pourquoi n’en change-t-il pas ? L’attrait du pouvoir compenserait-il ce dur martyre ?
L’auteur reverra le secrétaire général quelques semaines plus tard, le jour où, les recettes flanchant, on a mis une autre pièce en lecture. L’auteur voudrait que personne ne se doutât de ce cataclysme qui le déshonore… Mais, fatalement, dans la semaine, les journaux insèrent une petite note, louant la prévoyance de ce directeur, qui, malgré les formidables recettes de la pièce en cours, pense à monter un autre ouvrage… pour un avenir très éloigné…
L’auteur est arrivé au théâtre, écumant ou lamentable, toujours selon son tempérament… Mais personne ne sait qui a fait passer cette note. Tous ceux que le malheureux interroge répondent avec de délicieux visages de fillettes innocentes.
Si l’auteur est navré et humilié, c’est à cause de ses amis qui croyaient, s’imagine-t-il, que son œuvre était partie pour une longue carrière. Il a tort de s’en faire sur ce point. Depuis la générale, les amis ont une idée bien arrêtée, et leur seule surprise est que la pièce ait pu aller jusque-là.
Édouard Audoir, rédacteur à l’“Espoir”
C’est la veille de la générale, on répète le deux dans le décor du un. Omer, le grand premier rôle, est agité. Sur une observation de l’auteur, il s’asseoit et boude.
L D . — Omer, allons ! pas de nervosité…
O . — On s’énerverait à moins. Voilà trois semaines que nous répétons la scène dans un sentiment qu’on n’a pas changé. La veille de la répétition, il faut tout chambarder.
L’A . — Il ne s’agit pas de tout chambarder ; c’est une nuance que j’indique. C’est trois fois rien…
L D . — Alors si ce n’est rien, laissez-le tranquille.
L’A , se montant. J’ai le droit de parler ici autant et plus que n’importe qui.
L D . — Eh bien ! parlez, mon vieux, parlez tant qu’il vous plaira ! Il quitte le devant de la scène et va s’entretenir avec l’administrateur qui est au fond du plateau. Il affecte une grande indifférence. L’auteur s’en va d’un autre côté. Il voit tout à coup devant lui un gros petit jeune homme blond.
É A . — Maître, je suis M. Édouard Audoir, rédacteur à l’Espoir. M. Carbignac, notre directeur, tient
