Hector Berlioz. À travers chants

Livre en français. Réédition. Préface d’Emmanuel Reibel. Lyon : Symétrie / Palazzetto Bru Zane, 2013

Être ou ne pas être, voilà la question. Une âme courageuse doit-elle supporter les méchants opéras, les concerts ridicules, les virtuoses médiocres, les compositeurs enragés, ou s’armer contre ce torrent de maux, et, en le combattant, y mettre un terme ? Mourir, – dormir, – rien de plus. Et dire que par ce sommeil nous mettons fin aux déchirements de l’oreille, aux souffrances du cœur et de la raison, aux mille douleurs imposées par l’exercice de la critique à notre intelligence et à nos sens ! – C’est là un résultat qu’on doit appeler de tous ses vœux. – Mourir, – dormir, – dormir, – avoir le cauchemar peut-être. – Oui, voilà le point embarrassant. Savons-nous quelles tortures nous éprouverons en songe, dans ce sommeil de la mort, après que nous aurons déposé le lourd fardeau de l’existence, quelles folles théories nous aurons à examiner, quelles partitions discordantes à entendre, quels imbéciles à louer, quels outrages nous verrons infliger aux chefs-d’œuvre, quelles extravagances seront prônées, quels moulins à vent pris pour des colosses ? (Hector Berlioz)

In the 1850s, wishing to pass some of his writings on to posterity, and also give his contemporaries access to texts that had been published several decades earlier, Berlioz gathered some of his writings into three books: Les Soirées de l'orchestre (1852), Les Grotesques de la musique (1859), À travers chants (1862). The latter, including the 1844 Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie, is subtitled “Musical studies, adorations, witticisms and critiques”, and the “adorations” are given particular prominence, with much space devoted to composers he revered, especially Beethoven, Gluck and Weber. Berlioz’s pantheon consisted essentially of Germanic composers, who are now very well known, but were not so in the nineteenth century: he played a part in their sacralisation. More rigorous in its construction than the other two, the third collection presents an aesthetic and theoretical reflection in favour of modernity; Berlioz also shows an interest (exceptional for that time) in acoustic spaces: he is critical of the oversized concert halls that were being built in the second half of the century, whose acoustics affected vocal technique and pitch, and obliged orchestras to play at full volume. Impervious to the appeal of Wagner, but by no means nostalgic, he continued to defend an elitist conception of art, while upholding an ideal of music as elevated and accessible “only to those who are intelligent, educated and endowed with imaginative capacity. To define music thus is to avow that we do not believe […] that it is made for everyone.”

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