Hector Berlioz’s Mémoires is perhaps the greatest autobiography written by a composer. It’s certainly the funniest. In electrifying prose, he begs you to take his music seriously, if not always the man behind the music. He relishes being the rascal of romanticism, caring little for factual accuracy in his storytelling and providing priceless portraits of his contemporaries. Of Felix Mendelssohn, a head prefect figure to the Young Turk Berlioz, he writes that he could be “prickly as a porcupine whenever the talk was of music; you never knew where to take hold of him without getting your fingers hurt”.
Yet, throughout the book, Berlioz is also emotionally frank in a way that can be disarming. The last chapter, written in October 1854 when he was 50, finds him in a contemplative mood, verging on despair. His wife, Harriet, had recently died after a long, disabling illness. Their marriage was miserable, but she had nonetheless been a highly significant person in his life, inspiring the famous Symphonie fantastique of 1830, a sonic impression of infatuation decades ahead of its time.
Berlioz, a physician’s son who pursued music against his family’s wishes, was still a student at the Paris Conservatoire when he wrote that work. Since then, his fortunes had been mixed. He was a pioneer – the first French romantic and, it’s been argued, the first exponent in Europe of what would later be termed “The Future of Music” – but his innovative, often grandiose compositions usually landed better in Germany than France. And so, in his memoir’s final chapter, he imagines a bleak road ahead in his homeland, with little deviation from the arduous path he has already travelled. Paris, he believed, was increasingly falling prey to “industrialism in art” – populism – exacerbating his sense of alienation. He ends the book: “For you, morons, maniacs, you dogs, you Guildensterns and Rosencrantzes, Iagos, Osrics, gadflies, crawling worms of every kind: farewell, my friends. I scorn you, and trust to have forgotten you before I die.”
Two months after finishing Mémoires, Berlioz’s telling of the nativity story, L’enfance du Christ (“The Childhood of Christ”), premiered at the Salle Herz in Paris. He expected a flop, warning his sister Adèle that no singers in the city would be able to do justice to an oratorio “so naively gentle in its colour and its forms”. But the 10 December premiere was a “gigantic success”, as Franz Liszt’s daughter Cosima reported to her father: “The hall was stirred to the depths.” It was restaged on Christmas Eve, and then again on 28 January 1855. Further praise flooded in, including from the composer Charles Gounod, who wrote to Berlioz to say the work was “full of an angelic purity and unction that recall what the blessed Fra Angelico dreamed and painted”.
Berlioz had a hit on his hands and one that would endure – L’enfance du Christ remains a Christmas staple 170 years after its premiere. It brought the composer much-needed financial returns, but also “stirred the mocker, the Mephistopheles in him”, as his great biographer David Cairns wrote. Of course Parisians enjoyed this more accessible work, because Parisians – in Berlioz’s view – were “halfwits”. Its triumph, he told his confidante Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, was “insulting to its older brothers”, Roméo et Juliette (1839) and La damnation de Faust (1845) – trickier, more revolutionary compositions that premiered to puzzlement and misunderstanding.
Inevitably, critics wondered whether L’enfance du Christ hinted at a taming of the wild man in older age, a suggestion that Berlioz resented. As he wrote in a letter added as a postscript to Mémoires: “The subject naturally lent itself to a mild and simplistic music.” Using a narrator, the story is told in three parts, beginning with King Herod ordering the massacre of infants in Judea, before following Joseph and Mary’s flight to Egypt with their newborn son, and eventually describing the family finding refuge in Sais.
Berlioz wasn’t religious; he saw it as a profoundly human story – a tale of compassion. And so L’enfance du Christ is a work of uncluttered melodic lines and rich, hymnal tones that seek poignancy before psychodrama. There’s an intentional yearning and nostalgia to his score, informed, as Cairns explains, “by the folk music of his native Dauphiné, the noëls and other popular chants he heard in his boyhood, and by the biblical oratorios of [Jean-François] Le Sueur, his teacher”.
L’enfance du Christ had an eccentric history. Four years before its premiere as three-part oratorio, Berlioz had a chorus from the work “L’adieu des bergers” (“The Shepherds’ Farewell”), performed twice as a musical hoax. He pretended it had been written by Pierre Ducré, a composer whom he had invented, complete with a fake backstory, and then used how well the chorus was received as evidence of “French prejudice” against him. For the avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez, writing in 1971, Berlioz admitting to the hoax “merely emphasised his contempt for the ‘authenticity’ of any orthodox reconstruction”. He saw L’enfance du Christ not as a truthful remembering of a past musical idyll, but Berlioz creating an intentionally “artificial paradise” in which he was taking “refuge from the anguish, the doubt and problems of his own day”.
Berlioz would have been delighted to know a fellow Frenchman, born 56 years after his death, took his music seriously. But even with the benefit of hindsight, Boulez struggled to nail Berlioz down. In 1969, Boulez wrote: “What Berlioz brought to music is so singular that it has not yet been truly absorbed, has not become an integral part of the tradition… Berlioz still seems to be isolated. He stands at a point where customary judgement cannot be easily applied.”
Boulez pointed to a little-known essay that Berlioz wrote in which he describes, in minute detail, an orchestra of 467 instruments accompanied by a chorus of 360 singers. For Boulez, it suggests that Berlioz wasn’t of this world, or divorced from reality. Just as Beethoven wrote sonatas for pianos that hadn’t been invented yet, perhaps Berlioz was writing music for orchestras that could only exist in his imagination. Boulez hoped that Berlioz’s day would still come, but he wondered how. How do you solve a problem like Berlioz, when “solutions could barely be seen, literally speaking, as having anything to do with the original vision of Berlioz”?
Berlioz may have pretended to resent the warm reception of L’enfance du Christ. In reality, he was thrilled. The final chapter of Mémoires is a portrait of an artist on the brink of surrender, but as Cairns noted: “The success of L’enfance du Christ had immediate repercussions – most immediately an engagement for three concerts at the Brussels Opera. Offers also came from England and Germany as well as from Paris, where both Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre-Italien wanted to give it.” More importantly, he was inspired to keep composing, beginning his most ambitious work, Les Troyens (“The Trojans”), in 1856. For Cairns, it is “an opera of visionary beauty and splendour, compelling in its epic sweep, fascinating in the variety of its musical invention”. And perhaps it might never have seen the light of day if Berlioz hadn’t first seduced those halfwit Parisians with his ethereal take on the story of Christmas.
[See also: James Lee Burke’s garden of good and evil]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024