Called to the colours

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Thomson, Andrew

The music of Berlioz Julian Rushton Oxford UP (Oxford, 2001); xv, 363pp; L40 / 15.99 pbk. ISBN 0 19 816690 / 0 19 816738 5. Berlioz's orchestration treatise: a translation and commentary Hugh Macdonald Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 2002); xxxix, 388pp; 75. ISBN 0 521 23953 2.

Review Article

ANDREW THOMSON welcomes two distinguished

contributions to the Berlioz bicentenary

THE BICENTENARY of the birth of Hector Berlioz has certainly got off to an excellent start on the literary front. Only the best, it appears, are called to his colours. Following volume 2 of David Cairns's superlative biography (reviewed in MT, Summer 2001) comes a fine and much needed new translation and edition of the composer's Grande traite d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes, together with a most distinguished and penetrating study, The music of Berlioz, by Julian Rushton, a sequel to The musical language of Berlioz (1983). As its preface states, it deals with the meaning of the music, while avoiding the conventional work-- by-work study format. Written in three main parts, 'A biography of Berlioz's music', `Techniques and meanings' and `The works', its structure resembles a spiral, returning to its material in ever increasing detail. Carefully written as it is, the density of argument and interconnectedness of the parts make considerable demands on the reader, but the effort is richly rewarded. The author refers to and comments on a wide range of Berlioz scholarship while remaining lord of all he surveys. But this is no desiccated work of positivist musicology, nor a trendy postmodernist text, despite some rebarbative semiological terminology - signifier/signified, intertextuality. Above all, Professor Rushton's generous humanity and emotional maturity constantly shine through the constant stream of marvellous insights into Berlioz's music and thought processes.

This essentially humanistic vision in fact justifies his employment of an 'hermeneutical' approach, a term which needs a little more explanation than he actually gives us. Coined by the late-nineteenth-century German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, it indicates an act of 'reliving', the transformation of oneself into a different spiritual dimension in order to effect an imaginative recovery of past individual and cultural experience, including myth, literature and religious beliefs. Allied with this is a rigorous intertextual method, involving the investigation of Berlioz's frequent transfers of material from early apprentice works to those of his maturity. Indeed, as Rushton remarks, the twentieth century's archaeological exhumations of rejected juvenilia are liable to create complex identities for the canonical masterpieces. On a firm basis of musical description and analysis, he reveals an astonishing world of meanings and correspondences which greatly enhance our knowledge and response to works familiar and unfamiliar. And in the process the author of The music of Berlioz travels with the composer back to the engine, as it were, without preconceived causal explanations. Thus it seems barely possible that the young aspirant to the Prix de Rome had the slightest inkling that the main theme of his cantata Herminie - representing longing for an absent beloved - would soon become the Symphonie fantastique's famous idee fixe. But he must have realised that he had something very special on his hands. Indeed, Rushton wonders whether Berlioz actually brought his best ideas already formed into the exam room.

The revelatory discovery in 1991 of the early 1824 Messe solennelle brings a whole new dimension to Berlioz studies, and Rushton reveals in appropriate detail its crucial place in the composer's oeuvre. In vivid inventiveness and rhetorical originality he outstrips his master Le Sueur, while showing a firm grasp of contrapuntal and fugal techniques not at all evident in his examination results at the time. But more importantly, it contains an amazing number of excellent and well-known themes and ideas which reappear in subsequent works, exemplifying the student Berlioz's ability `to invent memorable phrases and whole tunes [which] ran ahead of his self-belief in matters of harmony, instrumentation and form'. As increasing experience brought technical mastery and imaginative scope, these borrowed ideas were made integral to later compositions. Some were taken from the Messe into the opera Benvenuto Cellini and freshly developed; likewise, a simple melodic statement in Rob Roy was transformed into the idee fixe of Harold en Italie and subjected to combination with other themes. The complete Agnus Dei of the Messe was turned into the Te Deum's `Te ergo quaesimus' movement with richer and more subtle instrumentation. With great perception, Rushton discusses how interesting questions of interpretation can arise when vocal music reappears in an instrumental work. This is the case with the Messe, whose `Gratias agimus' brings us closer to the heart of Berlioz's mal d'isolement in the `Scene aux champs' from the Symphonie fantastique; the former movement's `parabola from serenity through slight disturbance to serenity restored' anticipates the latter's `arch-shape at a lower emotional charge'.