Berlioz, Hoffmann, and the Genre Fantastique in French Romanticism
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BERLIOZ, HOFFMANN, AND THE GENRE FANTASTIQUE IN FRENCH ROMANTICISM A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Francesca Mary Brittan August 2007 © 2007 Francesca Mary Brittan BERLIOZ, HOFFMANN, AND THE GENRE FANTASTIQUE IN FRENCH ROMANTICISM Francesca Mary Brittan, Ph.D. Cornell University, 2007 Taking Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique as its focus, this dissertation explores the idea of a musical fantastic in nineteenth-century France. It offers a series of new readings of Berlioz’s first symphony that trace the work’s connection to literature, politics, visual art, and science, reconnecting it with the broader culture of the fantastic that evolved in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Drawing extensively on nineteenth-century criticism, it identifies Berlioz as one of the key exponents of the genre fantastique, a musical category closely tied to the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Jacques Callot, Victor Hugo, Salvator Rosa, and Dante Alighieri, and theorized in major journals and dictionaries of the period. Chapter One begins by gathering together Berlioz’s own commentary on the musical fantastic, examining its implications for form, syntax, and orchestration. It goes on to look at reception of the Symphonie fantastique, tracing theories of the musical fantastic as they emerge in the nineteenth-century press and at broader notions of fantastic genius that permeate Hoffmann’s tales and French contes fantastiques. Chapter Two examines relationships between Berlioz’s symphonic program and emerging French psychiatric theory, identifying the idée fixe at the center of the work as the primary symptom of a pseudo-scientific disease called monomania. It reopens old questions surrounding the relationship between art and life in the Fantastique, linking Berlioz’s symphonic self-fashioning with the strategies of the Romantic confession. Chapter Three turns to questions of sound and form in the musical fantastic, theorizing connections between Berlioz’s distorted shapes and experimental timbres and the aesthetics of the grotesque. Here, music is drawn into discourse with visual culture and with notions of literary caricature and humor central to works by Hoffmann, Gautier, Jean-Paul Richter, and Victor Hugo. Expanding outward, Chapter Four examines the broader repertory of the genre fantastique, undermining long- standing notions of Berlioz as an isolated and eccentric composer. It looks not only at other fantastic symphonies but at a range of orchestral, chamber, and keyboard works bearing the “fantastique” label. The fantastic emerges as a concrete musical category and Berlioz as one of the pioneering figures in a vital but little-known compositional tradition. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Francesca Brittan was born in London, England and grew up in Canada and Mexico. She completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Musicology at the University of Western Ontario, followed by Certificat studies in historical performance at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Holland. While pursuing Master’s and Doctoral work at Cornell University, she studied fortepiano with Malcolm Bilson. Currently, she holds a Research Fellowship at Queens’ College, Cambridge. iii For my parents, Cora and Eric Brittan, whose love of and belief in the fantastic have made this work possible. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is my pleasure to acknowledge, first and foremost, the members of my dissertation committee, whose support and generosity have carried me through this project and through the degree at large. I have relied on Neal Zaslaw’s capacious knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orchestras, his keen eye for historical detail, his ability to find seemingly untraceable scores and documents, and – most importantly – his unwavering kindness and sense of humor. Jim Webster’s expertise as an analyst has saved me from many blunders, as has his exhaustive knowledge of the nineteenth- century repertory. He coached me through my first attempts at editing and also leapt to the rescue when my Soubre recording project foundered. Annette Richards’ wonderful seminars and lectures sparked my own interest in the musical fantastic and allowed me to generate the questions that frame this dissertation. Her scholarship has served as a model for my own, opening up a rich set of methodologies and a fundamentally new way of thinking about the discipline. Finally, I am grateful for Julian Rushton’s interest in and support of this project. He has lent me his expertise on Berlioz and on all things French, and been consistently generous toward a much younger colleague. I owe a debt of gratitude to my family – my parents and three sisters – and to my loving partner, all of whom have listened patiently over the years to my fantastic ruminations. And I am especially indebted to my friends and colleagues at Cornell, who have been like a second family. Last but not least, I would like to thank the funding bodies that financed my research. In addition to the Graduate School and the Department of Music at Cornell University, I was supported by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada. v TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH iii DEDICATION iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v LIST OF FIGURES viii LIST OF TABLES ix INTRODUCTION 1 1. CONFIGURING A FANTASTIC BERLIOZ 8 Gluck, Berlioz, and the Rhetoric of the Musical Fantastic Echoes of the Political and Philosophical Fantastic Dante, Salvator Rosa, and the Fantastic Sublime Hoffmann and the Literary Fantastic Berlioz, Blaze, and the Musical École fantastique 2. FANTASY, PATHOLOGY, AND ROMANTIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY 108 Idées fixes: Uncanny Returns The Trope of Pathology in the ‘Fantastic’ Letters Early Psychiatry and the Formulation of a ‘Monomania’ Diagnosis Of Monomaniacal Heroes and Fixated Artists Pathology and the Poetics of Romantic Self-Writing 3. FANTASTIC FORM AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE GROTESQUE 168 “In Callots Manier” Configuring the Romantic Grotesque A Historical Tour of the French Grotesque Victor Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell Hugo—Boulanger—Berlioz: A Grotesque Continuum Schumann’s Review: The Framework for a Grotesque Reading of the Symphonie fantastique Beyond Schumann: The Fantastique Today vi 4. BERLIOZ IN CONTEXT: THE GENRE FANTASTIQUE BEFORE AND AFTER 241 The Fantastique Past and Present The Other Fantastic Symphonies The Pièce fantastique in Mid-Century France Berlioz in Retrospect or The Fate of the Genre fantastique APPENDIX 300 BIBLIOGRAPHY 320 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Gargoyles from the Cathedral of St. Pol de Léon. 185 Figure 2 Jacques Callot, The Temptation of St. Anthony. 188 Figure 3 Jacques Callot, The Temptation of St. Anthony, detail. 189 Figure 4 Louis Boulanger, illustration for Victor Hugo’s La Ronde du Sabbat. 205 Figure 5 Soubre, Symphonie fantastique, concert announcement. 251 viii LIST OF TABLES Table 1 Turbry, Symphonie fantastique, literary program. 248 Table 2 Programmatic and Structural Links between Berlioz and Soubre. 255 Table 3 Prose description of Arnal’s Symphonie fantastique. 262 Table 4 Parodical symphonic program, Le Corsaire, 1838. 264 Table 5 Parodical symphonic program, Le Ménestrel, 1836. 266 Table 6 Parodical concert program, Le Ménestrel, 1837. 271 Table 7 Select bibliography of Fantastique instrumental works. 272 ix INTRODUCTION Les questions sur le fantastique sont elles-mêmes du domaine de la fantaisie. [Charles Nodier, 1830] In France, literary scholars have long been fascinated with the fantastic. Pierres Georges Castex produced one of the first modern studies on the subject, Le conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (1951), which sparked a wave of interest leading from Louis Vax’s La séduction de l’étrange; étude sur la littérature fantastique and Roger Caillois’ Au coeur du fantastique (both 1965), to Tzvetan Todorov’s well-known The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (originally published as Introduction à la littérature française; 1970).1 For Todorov, the fantastic was an impulse native to France and vital to the collection of the political and aesthetic impulses he calls Romanticism.2 It had its roots in Jacque Cazotte’s Le diable amoureux (1772), re-emerging in mid-century writing by Nerval, Nodier, Gautier, Sand, Baudelaire, Maupassant, and others. Even E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales, translated in the late 1820s and early 30s, were ‘naturalised,’ becoming more 1 Pierres Georges Castex, Le conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: Corti, 1951); Louis Vax, La séduction de l’étrange; étude sur la littérature fantastique (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1965); Roger Caillois, Au coeur du fantastique. (Paris: Gallimard, 1965); Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by Richard Howard (Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973); orig. pub. as Introduction à la littérature française (Paris: Seuil, 1970); see also Irène Bessière, Le Récit fantastique: la poétique de l’incertain (Paris: Larousse, 1974), pp. 70-74. The French were also among the first to anthologize fantastic tales; see P.G. Castex, Anthologie du conte fantastique français (Paris: Corti, 1963) and Louis Vax, Les chef d’oeuvre de la littérature fantastique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979). 2 The term ‘romantique’ is an unavoidable though problematic one with a complicated history. French dictionaries of the early