It’s a major birthday today for those of us who admire the seething Romantics.
I’ve written a lot about Hector Berlioz over the years (feel free to search at rossamico.com), but because of the day’s obligations and the mounting pressure of the holidays, I thought I could get away with sharing a few caricatures.
After all, Berlioz had one of the great heads of hair in all of classical music, and his compositions have invited parody by cartoonists who fill with their pages with exploding cannon, roaring choruses, and ruptured eardrums. No one can say Berlioz didn’t earn it, although he could exercise touching restraint, on occasion, as in his chansons, his song cycle “Les Nuits d’été,” and his Christmas oratorio “L’Enfance du Christ.”
Yeah, he could be a little crazy at times, like when he wouldn’t take no for an answer when attempting to woo the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, to the point that he composed an epic, programmatic symphony, evocative of an opium-induced fever dream, her murder (!), his execution, and a witches’ sabbat, hoping to impress her. (He did.)
Or the time he raced back to France from Italy in a coach with two loaded pistols, a vial of poison, and women’s clothes, planning a cross-dressing murder of his inconstant fiancée and her lover. (He abandoned the plot after he forgot the dress when changing coaches.)
But he could also be incisive in his observations and exhibited a wry sense of humor in his writings.
The website at the link below is full of amusing Berlioziana, and in fact it was in doing an image search for caricatures that I discovered it. The administrators are a husband-and-wife team of retired Scottish academics who are passionate about the composer. The site is the result of nearly 30 years’ effort. A lot of the images were scanned from their own personal collection, so if I’m going to violate their claim of copyright by borrowing a couple to illustrate this piece, I might as well give them some free publicity and direct you to the site, which is quite staggering as a resource for information about the composer. It betrays an obsessive quality worthy of the great Berlioz himself!
Thank you, Michel Austin and Monir Tayeb*, for all your hard work and generosity. And happy birthday, Hector Berlioz!
http://www.hberlioz.com
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*In looking more deeply into the website, I learn that Monir Tayeb passed away in 2021. My condolences to her widower, Michel Austin. I certainly mean no disrespect with my whimsical tone. I am sincerely awed by their accomplishment!
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IMAGES: From “The Hector Berlioz Website,” cartoons published in “Le Figaro,” March 3, 1883: “H. Berlioz – Before” and “H. Berlioz – Today”
Tag: Hector Berlioz
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Brickbats and Adulation for Berlioz
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Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ Explained
I read a lot of Berlioz over the past year. (He was the composer of focus at last summer’s Bard Music Festival.) If his Memoirs make one thing clear, it’s that people, with all their foibles and bureaucracies, are always the same. And when it comes to Berlioz’s music, haters gonna hate.
Granted, Berlioz’s music is like nobody else’s, so forward-looking at times that it still makes listeners accustomed to the more rational works of his predecessors (Beethoven was still viewed askance in some circles) and milder contemporaries (Mendelssohn was a friend) uneasy. He never mastered the finer points of theory, they grumble. He makes too much noise. He’s just plain weird. Well, yeah, maybe. But those things are also what make him great.
Of his large-scale compositions, perhaps there is no greater retort to the Berlioz agnostic than “L’enfance du Christ” (“The Childhood of Christ”). The work is rare in Berlioz’s canon in that it wasn’t uniformly lambasted by the Parisian critics when it was given its debut in 1853. In fact, his detractors lauded this kinder, gentler style, and identified it as a welcome shift in Berlioz’s development; which Berlioz, of course, declared to be nonsense. The style merely suited the subject, he said, and had he written “L’enfance” twenty years earlier, he would have approached it in precisely the same manner.
The work came to him easily, if in somewhat of a piecemeal fashion. Berlioz rolled it out gradually, with one of the best-known numbers, “The Shepherds’ Farewell,” originally conceived as an organ piece for a friend. This he soon transformed into a choral setting, which he impishly introduced under the assumed name of a fictitious 17th century composer, Ducré. The audience at the first performance was enchanted. At least one old woman was heard to remark, “Berlioz would never be able to write a tune as simple and charming as this little piece by old Ducré.”
Next to be composed was the tenor aria, “Le repos de la sainte famille” (“The Repose of the Holy Family”). This and “The Shepherd’s Farewell” are two of the most striking movements of the entire work. It’s easy for “Le repos,” especially, to get stuck in one’s head. Then again, my head is full of flypaper for this sort of thing.
Berlioz added an overture and called it “La fuite en Egypte” (“The Flight into Egypt”). The premiere was so successful that he was encouraged to create a companion piece, “L’arrivée à Sais” (“The Arrival at Sais”), which included parts for Mary and Joseph. “Le songe d’Hérode” (“Herod’s Dream”), the first panel of the completed triptych, was the last to be composed.
Though Berlioz himself was not religious, he had a lifelong appreciation for the beauty of religious music (as long as it didn’t conclude with a fugue, a fashion he found ludicrously academic and generally out of keeping with the subject at hand).
This composer, who achieved notoriety for his lurid evocations of witches’ sabbaths, brigands’ orgies, and headlong galops into the abyss of Hell, described “L’enfance du Christ” as a “sacred trilogy.” It is perhaps the least outlandish of his major works. It has maintained its popularity and is still performed around Christmas. Not too long ago, you might even encounter it on American classical radio. In 2024, I wish you luck with that. At the risk of mixing my biblical references, the struggle against Philistinism never ends.
Happy birthday, Hector Berlioz!
“The Shepherds’ Farewell”
“Le repos de la sainte famille”
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Bard’s Berlioz & His World: A Deep Dive
When the Bard Music Festival calls itself “[insert composer’s name here] and His World,” it does so with the aim of providing a diverse, expansive, and at times even exhausting exploration of the subject’s contemporaries, his influences, those he influenced, and his wider legacy. And by suggesting that it can wear you out, I am in no way implying that I don’t love it. If Bard can bring it, I can take it, and with gratitude.
As you undoubtedly know by now, if you’ve been following my posts, this year’s focus is Berlioz. However, even with such a heavy helping of Hector as on the concert presented on Saturday night, featuring not only the composer’s titanic “Te Deum,” but also selections from his grand opera “Les Troyens” (“The Trojans”) and a mammoth setting of “La Marseillaise” that REALLY would have flabbergasted Major Strasser, there was also the inclusion of Gluck’s overture to “Iphigénie en Aulide” (Gluck, a composer who influenced Berlioz), in an arrangement by Wagner (a composer Berlioz in turn influenced) – ingenious programming, actually, but hardly surprising – AND the overture to Auber’s “Fra Diavolo” (Auber, a figure who undoubtedly influenced Berlioz, but about whom Berlioz could be rather ambivalent, feeling he pandered a little too much to what he perceived as shallow Parisian tastes).
And you know what? For as popular as Auber’s overtures remain – for decades, staples of afternoon drive time on any classical music radio station – this may actually have been the first time I ever actually heard one in concert. How can that possibly be? Any one of them would make for a sparkling opener to an enjoyable evening of music-making. (Sorry, Berlioz!) As it is, he is yet another composer whose music I encountered live for the first time at Bard.
So often with Berlioz, who at the far end of his large-scale works can be such a frankly draining composer, I am convinced he willed himself to greatness. What a genius he must have been to take the rudimentary tools he had at his disposal and create such monuments in sound. Unquestionably, he knew his way around an orchestra. And he was well-drilled by his teachers at the Paris Conservatory. Yet he was perhaps not so naturally inclined to the minute workings-out of formal musical procedures in the manner of a Haydn or a Mozart. If so, he was all the better for it, as there is only one Hector Berlioz. No one thought in orchestral terms quite like him. But at the other end of the scale, he was also a born composer of song.
Earlier in the day, a Saturday morning panel discussion examined different aspects of the composer and his world through engaging and often fascinating talks and exchanges about revolution, the historical evolution of Paris in the 19th century, and even how Berlioz was received and interpreted by the droll caricaturists of his time.
As is so often the case with Bard, the most shattering moments may have come during in the evening concerts, when the full forces of symphony orchestra and chorus were massed at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts; but most of the quieter, more revelatory moments occurred in the more intimate space of Bard’s Olin Hall, at which song and chamber music prevailed.
At the Fisher Center, Joshua Blue’s pleasing tenor voice lent considerably to the opening night rehabilitation of Berlioz’s “Lélio” (at least in terms of the work’s musical content). He returned on Saturday night not only as soloist in the “Te Deum,” but to share a love duet from “Les Troyens” with mezzo-soprano Megan Moore. He might have been the weekend’s greatest vocal discovery, if not for soprano Jana McIntyre. (Even so, those attending Bard this Sunday will have no complaints, as Blue will sing Berlioz’s Faust!)
McIntyre, with her captivating voice, magnetic presence, and superhuman endurance, appeared frequently throughout the weekend and emerged as the most enchanting performer at Olin. Always radiant and communicative, she was in her element in French art song during her frequent afternoon appearances on the chamber concerts. But on Saturday night, she also demonstrated her ability to command a concert hall, even in Berlioz’s gargantuan arrangement of “La Marseillaise,” with its massed brass, winds, percussion, and chorus. She stood her ground – “the very embodiment of liberty,” as a fellow concertgoer memorably put it – dominating center stage in a brilliant red gown with her chin held high. Yes, coupled with the “Te Deum” AND selections from “Les Troyens,” AND the aforementioned overtures, by Gluck (arr. Wagner) and Auber, it proved to be a high-caloric evening!
I can’t believe she had any voice at all left over for Sunday morning, yet there she was at 11 a.m., participating extensively in Byron Adams’ matinée musicale, where she continued to shine and, quite frankly, glow. What a talent! She easily stood out as the star of the festival’s first weekend, and she receives a respectful tip of the hat from Classic Ross Amico.
As for the music itself, discoveries I will carry with me include the “Introduction and Variations on Bellini’s Opera ‘Norma’” by Elias Parish Alvars (known in his day as “the Liszt of the harp”), mesmerizingly played by Noël Wan, a String Quartet in C minor by Anton Reicha (who taught Berlioz counterpoint at the Paris Conservatory, previously known to me mostly from his woodwind music), affectionately performed by the Balourdet Quartet, and a languid, intoxicating song, “Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe,” by Georges Bizet (of “Carmen” fame), again sung by McIntyre, as part of Byron Adams’ exquisitely-curated program of French chansons, romances et mélodies on Sunday.
Baritone Tyler Duncan, a Bard veteran, as always was a singer of commanding presence, but also expert at conveying the wry tone of a song like Saint-Saëns’ witty throwback to the manners of the ancien regime, “Marquise, vous souvenez-vous?” Also returning was mezzo-soprano Rebecca Ringle Kamarei. For as fine as she was in the afternoons, she was outstanding on Sunday evening in a virtuosic performance of an aria by Rossini from “L’italiana in Algeri.”
I would be remiss not to credit the contributions of pianists Kayo Iwama and Erika Switzer, both with their own distinctive musical personalities, who not only accompanied but were sensitive collaborators with the aforementioned singers.
I want to treat Sunday night’s treasurable presentation of Pauline Viardot’s fairy tale opera “Le dernier sorcier” (“The Last Sorcerer”), which concluded the opening weekend, in a separate post. So watch for it!
The Bard Music Festival resumes today with a supplementary, already sold-out concert at Church of the Messiah in Rhinebeck, NY (with a second concert to be held there tomorrow afternoon), but Weekend Two really commences in earnest with a concert tomorrow night at the Fisher Center on Bard campus, featuring violist Luosha Fang and pianist Piers Lane in Franz Liszt’s transcription of Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy.” The program on Saturday night will include Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 and Joachim Raff’s Symphony No. 10 “Autumn.” Sunday will conclude with a complete performance of Berlioz’s “The Damnation of Faust.”
“Berlioz and His World” continues, largely at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, through Sunday, August 18. For more information, visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/
Fisher Center at Bard
Jana McIntyre sings Aminta in Richard Strauss’ rarely-heard “Die schweigsame Frau” (“The Silent Woman”) at Bard in 2022, at the link:
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Berlioz’s Crazy Genius at Bard Festival
Hector Berlioz was not the kind of guy to always go about things the way you might expect. For instance, if you wanted to impress a prospective lover, would you think it would be in your best interest to write a programmatic symphony, in which your obsession with her drives you to overdose on opium? Then, under its influence, to dream about murdering her, so that you’re condemned to execution by the guillotine? Then to vividly illustrate being tormented in the Hereafter by her spirit, now transformed into a jeering, cackling witch?
Well, Berlioz, arch-Romantic that he was, was a guy who followed his gut. And what do you know, it worked! The Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, who inspired the piece (even though Berlioz didn’t speak English and she couldn’t speak French), said “I do.” Some chicks dig the crazy.
Not that they lived happily ever after. I know, who could have predicted it?
Anyway, this is the backdrop to Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique,” his most famous work, and it kicked off the Bard Music Festival, “Berlioz and His World,” at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Friday night. Leon Botstein, founder and co-artistic director of the festival (and president of Bard College), conducted The Orchestra NOW (TON for short), Bard’s graduate-level training orchestra.
As is so often the case, if you own a recording of the piece, for as transporting as it might be, it just isn’t the same as hearing it live. Reencountering Berlioz’s forward-looking symphony (which must have caused heads to explode in 1830) blew my hair back, or what’s left of it, again and again. It’s hard to believe I once had a coif every bit as impudent as the composer’s. Why, it seems like only yesterday…
But I digress.
With its faltering chromatic harmony, beefed-up orchestra (for the period), Beethovenian length, and outlandish instrumental effects, it pushed the envelope decades into the future. Wagner (among others) glommed onto Berlioz, but the composer’s legacy truly flourished with the generation of Gustav Mahler, nearly 70 years later. That’s an entire lifetime. His concept of the “idée fixe,” a recurring motif that intrudes on the flow of every movement, signifying unbidden remembrances of the composer’s beloved, was also influential.
On to the performance at hand: I may have heard wilder ones, but none quite so visceral. With the strings at stage level, the rowdier instruments were positioned on risers, and the bass drums in particular were like volcanoes that exploded into the audience. The chimes that herald the “Dies Irae,” a presentiment of the doom if ever there was one, were immediate and chilling. It was great fun to watch the strings put through their diabolical repertoire of col legno, con sordino, pizzicato, tremolo, and double stopping, and the ensemble was able to bring the energy to put the piece over the top and bring a sense of abandon at its peak moments.
Also notable was the inclusion of the obbligato cornet in the second movement, the one in which composer’s pangs of longing contrast with the spirited whirl of festivity at a ball, a touch seldom employed. Apparently Berlioz added the cornet (perhaps for the virtuoso Jean-Baptiste Arban), but it never made it into the published score in the composer’s lifetime. I love you, Berlioz, but in this instance I think your original conception was best. For me, the cornet brings unfortunate associations with the gazebo or the boardwalk, and also obscures the elegance of this waltz through the composer’s haunted mansion – but it was ear-opening to hear the alternative version for once at Bard. Part of the festival’s mission, after all, is to be a platform for scholarly inquiry and display. If the movement were going to be done this way, this was definitely the context in which to do it. (I believe the cornet soloist was Jid-anan Netthai, but this I will have to confirm.)
I confess, I had my reservations about starting the festival with such a substantial and well-known piece. When the program was first announced, I was puzzled as to why Bard, known for its exploration of unusual and the neglected repertoire, would open its festival with Berlioz’s greatest hit. But in the event, it certainly paid off and got blood pumping. I also realized after a moment’s reflection, its inclusion provided the necessary context for the full appreciation of the seldom-encountered “Lelio,” which was heard on the second half of the concert.
A sequel of sorts to the “Symphonie fantastique,” “Lelio, or the Return to Life” comes across as a much more self-indulgent affair, if only because of the extensive dramatic commentary allotted to the narrator. Again, this is a heavily autobiographical piece. Unfortunately, if you take away all the lofty references to art and Shakespeare, it’s basically the whiny “reflections” of a lovelorn 20-something.
The Bard presentation made it even more so. I have nothing against Babe Howard (the son of Debra Winger), who was presumably a late substitute for the scheduled narrator, Wyatt Mason, and I wish him all the best with his career. But here he came across as sorely miscast and underprepared, to the extent of not perhaps fully understanding the character of the figure he was meant to portray. I can think of no lower compliment than to say that I could have done it just as well myself. (I too spent much of my twenties as lofty, whiny, and lovelorn.) For me, it was just too much of a stretch to accept him as the convincing alter ego of a seething, half-mad artist, emerging from an opium-induced nightmare to grasp his breaking heart. About the only thing he played convincingly was young. Also, he didn’t impress me much as an actor accustomed to appearing on the stage. That’s not to say the technique will not come, but I imagine he would be much more at home in something more contemporary.
That aside, the music was fascinating, and very well performed. Having previously known “Lelio” only from recordings – especially Jean Martinon’s, in which the narrator delivers his part in French – it was as if the scales had fallen from my eyes. THIS is what Bard is all about! I’ve aired the concluding “Fantasy on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’” on my radio shows many times, but I had no idea the entire score was so varied and beautiful, with the quality of the music quite high. That said, it’s impossible that it will ever secure a place in the public’s affection equal to that enjoyed by the “Symphonie fantastique,” especially as presented here, as the composer originally intended, emulating the salon format, so popular in that era, but also in the guise of a melodrama, a largely-defunct genre in which narration and music are combined to form a cohesive dramatic statement.
As always, the Bard Festival Chorus and vocal soloists were first-rate, with bass-baritone Alfred Walker delivering a lusty “Brigands’ Song” and tenor Joshua Blue (who returned on Saturday night to solo in Berlioz’s “Te Deum”) lending further allure to “The Fisherman Ballad” and the “Song of Happiness.” The cumulative effect was one of magnification of the impressive range of Berlioz’s genius, which ranges well beyond the heaven-storming orchestral works that are so well known, especially as a composer for voice.
I pause to wonder: whatever happened to the brigand, anyway? It’s a career that seems to have gone the way of the melodrama.
All in all, a rewarding, often captivating, and at times even thrilling evening, and presented in a manner that Bard has perfected over the past 33 seasons. Bravo, and more, please!
The Bard Music Festival continues through August 18. For more information, follow the link.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/
Fisher Center at Bard
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Bard Music Festival Encounters Fisher Center at Bard
One of the great pleasures of attending the Bard Music Festival is not only the obvious enjoyment that comes from listening to and learning about the subject at hand (this year, Hector Berlioz), but also the sense of conviviality experienced in the company of likeminded music lovers from all walks of life.
Here I am with my newest friend from Bard. No, not Berlioz. That’s Bill Osborne on the left. Bill is a retired organist who studied at Fontainebleau with the venerable pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. For over 40 years, he served as Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Denison University.
In that capacity, he also directed the Denison Singers, which brought him to Princeton a couple of times to perform at Westminster Choir College and Princeton University Chapel. He adds impishly that some of their belongings were stolen at Princeton High School. But Bill, a true gentleman and a lovely raconteur, shares all his stories with a laugh and a twinkle in his eye.
As a student in France, he also encountered legendary organist-composers Marcel Dupré and Olivier Messiaen. During one memorable lesson, he was caught on the bench between Boulanger and André Marchal, the celebrated blind organist of St. Germain des Pres, with their at times conflicting philosophies, trying his best to diplomatically serve two masters.
Boulanger was notorious for her strict instruction and strong opinions. Bill observed that she was a stickler for punctuality in her students, yet she herself was always late for lessons. Once, he too was running behind, and he ran into her in the courtyard. Mademoiselle, as she was affectionately known, demanded to know why he wasn’t already at their lesson.
Back in the United States, during the course of some research he was conducting in New York, he was put up in a penthouse at the Dakota. I probably don’t have to tell you about the Dakota. It’s one of the top-tier apartment buildings on Central Park West. Anyway, he got a big kick out of that. The building is so crammed with celebrities that whenever he peered over a balcony a paparazzo would snap his photo from the street, assuming he must be somebody famous.
Once, he walked out of the building just as a limousine pulled up. Who should spring out of the back seat but Leonard Bernstein. In his classic effusive manner, Lenny walked up to Bill, who was agog, and enfolded him in a warm embrace. Lenny said, “So good to see you again,” assuming that, if he lived at the Dakota, he must have known him; but of course, Bill had never seen him before in his life.
Bill was also responsible for introducing the organ works of Petr Eben to the United States, after receiving the scores from the hand of the composer during a tour of Czechoslovakia. He went on to record an album of Eben’s works for Crystal Records.
What an interesting, affable fellow! I enjoyed chatting with him over several days. You never know who you’re going to meet at Bard.
This year’s Bard Music Festival, “Berlioz and His World,” continues through August 18. For more information, follow the link.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/
Fisher Center at Bard
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