‘Perhaps no artist,’ wrote Charles Koechlin of Berlioz in 1922, ‘has ever caused so many divergences of opinion.’ Certainly one does not have far to go to unearth the insults. Slonimsky’s invaluable Lexicon of Musical Invective devotes five pages to them – fewer than for Brahms, who scores 12, but still a choice selection, as in George Templeton Strong’s diary entry for December 17, 1864: ‘Overture to King Lear by Berlioz, mere rubbish and rot. Shakespearian overtures by galvanized anthropoid Parisians are becoming a nuisance.’ Koechlin also relates that one Conservatoire professor in the 1920s still stoutly maintained that Berlioz would have done better to become a bootmaker. And so on. Although it all becomes wearisome quite quickly, for any enquiry into Berlioz the innovator these complaints do even so provide occasional insights into quite how far he was ahead of his times and in what respects. I have tried to organise the thoughts that follow under six headings, even if, in the nature of the music and of Berlioz the man, watertightness often turns out to be neither achievable nor desirable. Brickbats and bouquets will be noted where relevant.

The Sound

In my experience, this is what hits you first of all. It can’t be Verdi, it can’t be Wagner, it might at a pinch, at times, be Liszt, it certainly can’t be Mendelssohn, who had stern advice for anyone handling a Berlioz score (‘Now wash your hands!’). The American scholar Jacques Barzun, whose two-volume Berlioz and the Romantic Century is still a magnificently illuminating read after more than 50 years (and not a few of whose ideas will appear unacknowledged in what follows) referred to Berlioz’s orchestration as ‘wiry’ and ‘sinewy’, as opposed to Wagner’s ‘thick impasto’. Everything is extraordinarily audible – his detractors would say embarrassingly so. In his very first newspaper article, written in 1823 when he was 19, he was promoting the idea of an orchestra made up of independent groups, and this view never changed. Part of the Berlioz sound comes from his idiosyncratic use of vertical and horizontal spacing: that is, there are strange hollow patches in his orchestral chording, as well as silences that carry their own poetic message, like the spine-chilling one that follows Mephistopheles’s summons to his steeds in the Damnation de Faust.

It may not be true that he was the first composer to think directly on to the orchestra (although Messiaen claimed he was the first to ‘understand timbres’), but it does seem that way. Piano duettists can make a good deal of sense playing Beethoven symphonies; Berlioz’s orchestral works don’t respond nearly so well, and Chabrier’s unpublished duet version of Harold in Italy was designed, I would guess, more as an aid to composition than as something to be performed. Likewise, even virtuoso score readers like Saint-Saëns have admitted that you usually get only a faint glimpse of the Berlioz experience from just reading the score. The pudding has to be tasted.

Contemporary cartoons of the maestro on the podium with wild hair and flailing arms have reinforced the notion of Berlioz as a noisemaker, a galvanized anthropoid. Some of his music is indeed very loud. As the critic of the Musical Times reported after the 1888 performance of the Requiem in Birmingham, ‘A physical disturbance became inevitable among sensitive organisations,’ some of whom were forced to leave the hall. But in his writings Berlioz made it clear that what he was after was not noise, but power. In disposing his four brass bands around the hall, he was technically following the lead of the choirs in St Mark’s, Venice, and so this can’t be called exactly an innovation. Where he trod new ground was in making this an all-encompassing, all-pervading experience, such as The Rite of Spring provided some 75 years later, from which there was no escape except through the Exit. We are told that the Day of Wrath will not allow even for that…

These moments of grandeur (or excess) do exist, as do curious experiments like the notorious flutes-plus-trombones passage in the ‘Hostias’ which Paul Dukas likened to acrobats in a tragedy (will the trombones make it or not?) and about which the surmise of Cecil Forsyth, who had never heard the passage, that ‘It probably sounds very nasty’ prompted Gordon Jacob to respond: ‘The present writer has heard the passage. It does!’ More interesting though, are the many more reflective pages in Berlioz’s music: the quiet brass accompaniment to Mephistopheles’s ‘Voici des roses’ (Mephisto has the power to subdue everything), or the cor anglais/oboe dialogue in the ‘Scène aux champs’ in the Symphonie fantastique, which Koechlin called ‘absolutely new’, not even to be found in Weber. As for L’enfance du Christ, it is a compendium of intimate moments, which had the added virtue of conquering the Paris public and giving Berlioz the confidence to begin Les Troyens. But the intimacy is kept from being sentimental again by the spareness, almost the aridity of the orchestral sound, which is like nothing else from the mid-19th century. For every musician like Frederick Calder who in 1896 pronounced from the heights of the Royal Academy of Music that ‘L’enfance du Christ, in spite of two beautiful numbers, bores an audience almost as much as Liszt’s Holy Elizabeth,’ there was an Elgar for whom it was a favourite score and a Ravel who, though not in general a Berlioz lover, did possess discs of the work – indeed the only complete Berlioz work in his record library.

Melody, harmony, tonality, modality

‘Not only does M Berlioz not have any melodic ideas, but when one does occur to him, he doesn’t know how to handle it’ (the French critic Scudo in 1852). How anyone can deny Berlioz melodic ideas in the wake of Roméo et Juliette surpasses belief, but the second half of Scudo’s statement hits on an important point: Berlioz’s strange compulsion to twist the tail of a tune into ever more elaborate knots. The finale to Act 2 of Les Troyens, ‘Complices de sa gloire’, is one example out of many. Also the ending may be different second time around, as though Berlioz shared Chopin’s delight in improvising. These aberrant, loose-limbed melodies were but one facet of the unexpected (‘l’imprévu’), which Berlioz himself cherished as a feature of his style and can reasonably be included under the heading ‘the irrational’. Henri Dutilleux, a great Berlioz admirer, has confirmed the value of the irrational in composition, with the rider that one has to know how to deal with it! Whether Berlioz always did will no doubt remain debatable, but at least his convoluted tunes do always make it back to base in the end.

In talking about Berlioz’s harmony it may be useful to distinguish a base from a bass. Ravel was not alone in deploring Berlioz’s unwillingness (inability?) to write a ‘proper’ bass line under a tune. At the same time, the harmonic ‘base’, in the sense of a pole of attraction, is always fairly clear. Berlioz found the Tristan Prelude incomprehensible and his music never indulges in Wagnerian orgies of development and ‘becoming’. Instead, he moves freely and swiftly through discrete but clearly defined key areas, as in the first scene of Damnation where he either states or alludes directly to 11 different keys within 53 bars (figs 3-5). As Koechlin said, he ‘renewed the harmonic vocabulary of the French school, less by the chords themselves than by the way he used them.’

Of course there are chromatic elements in Berlioz (perhaps most notably his love for the minor 6th in the context of a major scale), but tonality and modality were backbones of his music. No stronger confirmation can be adduced of his attachment to tonality than the contrast between the end of Act 1 of Les Troyens, where the B flat tonality of the Trojan March is maintained, albeit in the minor, and the end of Act 4, where Mercury brutally interrupts the dreamy G flat major of the love duet and, with his cries of ‘Italie’, expels us into the cold, distant key of E minor. It’s as though the floor of the opera house has suddenly given way. His use of church modes opened up a field that was to be explored by nearly every French composer for the next hundred years. Their appearance in the music for Nubian slaves in Les Troyens is explicable in traditional ‘exotifying’ terms, but Herod’s aria in the Phrygian mode in L’enfance du Christ gains much more than an exotic tinge – did Debussy have this in mind in the Phrygian opening of his String Quartet?

Rhythm

Here, if anywhere, ‘l’imprévu’ is king. The jagged, asymmetrical shapes somehow seem to reflect the awkwardness and messiness of everyday life – they are real, not prefabricated textbook patterns. Berlioz delights in juxtaposing disparate note-lengths, challenging us to make sense of what, on the surface and at first hearing, can seem merely shocking and wilful. The rhythms of his vocal lines are surprising, varied, but always, as William Byrd put it, ‘framed to the life of the words’. Syllabic setting is the norm, with florid extensions only for specific reasons; as when Anna explains to Narbal that Dido actually ‘loves’ Aeneas – the little flourish on ‘aime’ suggests what she’s thinking (‘Men! Blind as bats!’). Elsewhere cross accents tell us that all is not what it seems: in Dido’s aria ‘Adieu! Fière cité!’, the 3/4 of the woodwind against the 6/8 time signature speaks of the turmoil beneath her regal dignity.

Contrasts, conflicts

Berlioz’s desire for an orchestra of independent elements marches with his vision of music as dual or multiple. In his more excitable moments, he rarely seems satisfied with doing just one thing at a time. In the Waverley and Francs Juges overtures, as Barzun points out, he writes simultaneous expositions of ‘unrelated themes in opposite nuances’. This understandably produced a sense of overload in some contemporary ears, as in those of the critic of the Boston Daily Advertiser who in 1874 called Berlioz ‘by far the least respectable of the composers of the new school’ (the composer had been dead five years). But in any battle between respectability and truth, Berlioz’s allegiance would never be in doubt. Perhaps his most astonishing depiction of conflict comes in the final chorus of Les Troyens, where the orchestra plays the Trojan national anthem while the Carthaginians curse the Trojans unto eternity – and specifically unto Hannibal. To end an opera with such a mixed message was a masterstroke that had no precursors in operatic history.

Counterpoint

Berlioz in his Memoirs quotes Ferdinand Hiller as saying that Berlioz ‘believes in neither God nor Bach’. For those who regard Bach as the undisputed Keeper of Counterpoint, this can easily be translated as saying that Berlioz had no interest in counterpoint or aptitude for it. Anyone holding to this view should beware the men in white coats. The trouble seems to have begun with Berlioz’s less-than-reverent fugal Amen chorus in the Damnation de Faust. But he himself made the point that it was not fugal choruses he was against, but the unsuitability of the word ‘Amen’ to this kind of treatment. This was, if you like, a ‘vowel complaint’. One can infer that it was also against the sort of automatic counterpoint for which you pressed the button marked ‘Counterpoint’ and out came a stream of notes duly packaged and labelled and tasting of cardboard. Berlioz’s counterpoint, on the other hand, is invariably alive, and every example different from every other: the swinging chorus of students and soldiers in Damnation; the tender overture to Part 2 of L’enfance; the impassioned funeral chorus ‘Jetez des fleurs’ in Roméo et Juliette (not believe in Bach?!). Finally, in the last act of Les Troyens, the brief but telling passage of imitation as the Trojan chieftains acknowledge that they have been losing sight of their mission (‘Nous avons trop longtemps bravé l’ordre céleste’). Here, for a brief moment, Berlioz seems to believe in both Bach and the gods.

Simplicity

My reading of Berlioz is that he was a complex man who did his utmost to reconcile his complexities and produce music that speaks directly and, yes, simply. This can be seen in the verbal texts he himself wrote (it may noted that with Lélio of 1832 he just got in ahead of Wagner, who began his career as auto-librettist the following year with Die Feen). If we exclude the invented languages of Mephistopheles’s attendant demons and of the Nubian slaves in Les Troyens (inventions that may have rubbed off on such widely differing works as Poulenc’s Rapsodie nègre and Messiaen’s Harawi and Cinq rechants), Berlioz’s texts are extremely direct and straightforward. None of them are great literature, nor did they need to be, since they serve the music in the same way as Wagner’s, Messiaen’s or Tippett’s. But the tone of his libretto for Les Troyens is a subtle mixture of the intimate, the harrowing, the passionate and the dignified, in accord with the ‘sentimental’ tone (to use Schiller’s terminology) of Virgil’s original rather than with the ‘naïve’ tone of Homer. The overall simplicity can perhaps best be appreciated through one of the few deliberate departures from it, when Chorebus in the opening scene calls Cassandre ‘pensive hamadryade’. This has the flavour of an in-joke between the two, even if Cassandra at this precise moment is not really in the mood for such things.

On the musical front, a mere catalogue of Berlioz’s simple, effective touches would fill a longer article than this one. I content myself with two. Few composers have made so much of simple scales: Enée’s downward scale on the words ‘Dussé-je être brisé par un tel désespoir’ in his final aria carries us inescapably with him into the pit of his torment. A second example comes from the song ‘Le spectre de la rose’ from Nuits d’été where, on the words ‘Mais ne crains rien…’, Berlioz takes us down a whole chain of 12 diminished 7ths in a row. This chord was the ‘tension/fear chord’ par excellence of 19th-century opera, not to mention more recently of silent movie pianists, and Berlioz has frequently been taxed with relying on it too much. But by using it to say precisely ‘Don’t be afraid!’ and by continuing it beyond the point where it is merely an oiling of the harmonic wheels, he gives it a value in its own right and reassures us that we are after all in safe hands.

To sum up

Ultimately this necessarily incomplete list of details makes perhaps a less powerful case for Berlioz the innovator than two more general points.

Berlioz was the first composer to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Beethoven, that the form of a work should be dictated by its content. Berlioz’s willingness, indeed desire to grasp this particular nettle was another thing that made his music hard to understand in its own time: ‘Berlioz is fantastic in the structure of his movements – unmeaningly so – and this…renders his music necessarily tiresome and unattractive to a polite ear’ (Musical Examiner, London, 1 June 1844). It meant that you couldn’t sit down to listen to a Berlioz work safe in the knowledge that it would progress from an introduction to a first subject to a bridge passage and so on. It is also true that these fantastic structures contain more ideas of interest per minute than many contemporary composers managed in a whole opera. We should therefore not be too hard on the Musical Examiners of this world. Grappling with Berlioz’s idiosyncratic syntax must have been like reading Joyce’s Ulysses by the light of a 30 watt bulb underwater. For us today this refusal of Berlioz’s music ever to be dull or predictable is one of its joys, in which, rather curiously, it obeys Ravel’s dictum that ‘the test of good form is continuity of interest’ – curiously, because, as mentioned earlier, Ravel had little time for Berlioz’s music, reassuring Stravinsky about the acoustics of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées with the words ‘perfect, to the point of exposing the subtlety in Berlioz’s harmonies…’ He did though, like practically every other composer over the last 150 years, orchestrate with Berlioz’s Traité at his elbow.

The second general point is that Berlioz was innovative in establishing the mid-19th-century template for ‘the Romantic composer’, chronologically a little way ahead of Liszt, even if in the matter of wild hair the pianist had a slight edge. Tchaikovsky, who got to know Berlioz in Russia, didn’t like the music but had enormous affection and admiration for the man, whom he saw as being ‘persecuted alike by fate and his fellow-creatures’. For Tchaikovsky, Berlioz was a model of the disinterested, idealistic artist, struggling to maintain standards in the real world of performance and in the rat race that was Paris (or, to quote Berlioz, ‘the stinking bog’). Saint-Saëns remembered fraught rehearsals with Berlioz tearing his hair, faced with performers who were doing their absolute best but were simply not up to the task. This portrait of a creative artist who would not take no for an answer may have drawn tight little smiles from functionaries who had the unenviable task of mediating between Berlioz’s idealism and the real world, but it compelled and still compels admiration. In our tidier, more organised times, we perhaps discount Berlioz’s ‘irrationality’ to our loss. It’s a fair assumption that he will continue to provoke divergences of opinion for many years yet; to cease to do so, he would surely see as a fate worse than Dido’s.

Originally published in Gramophone, February 2003