Berlioz on Music by Katherine Kolb

Author:Katherine Kolb [Kolb, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199391950
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

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1. The idea that the practice and appreciation of music require a delicate mix of conditions, and that not all music is made for all people permeates Berlioz’s criticism in 1834–35, when his hostility was at its height toward Fétis and his book on music for everyone (La Musique mise à la portée de tout le monde, 1830).

2. Berlioz writes as one who experienced such an arrival in Paris after growing up in La Côte-Saint-André, a small town near Grenoble.

3. The solo was evidently of his composition. Although its inclusion mars the perfect program, free of frivolities, that Berlioz has just acclaimed, he is not about to offend Henri Brod (1799–1839), oboist, composer, oboe manufacturer, founding member of the Conservatoire orchestra, and principal oboe at the Opéra from 1819 until his early death, at the news of which Cherubini is reported to have muttered: “Small sound!”

4. “Hunters lost in the woods” (Act III, no. 21). What was actually heard at the Conservatoire were the arrangements by Castil-Blaze of Weber’s Euryanthe and Freischütz, titled respectively Euriante and Robin des bois. Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï, who checked the manuscript copy of Euriante in the Opéra library, found no prayer inserted between the two parts of the Hunters’ Chorus (CM 2:89). Whatever piece Castil-Blaze may have used, his tripartite arrangement of the chorus seems to represent, for Berlioz, one of those rare happy inventions by an arranger that he cannot help praising, as with David Garrick’s ending to Romeo and Juliet, mentioned further on.

5. Berlioz tells in Mem., chapter 35, of applauding vigorously at the unison duet by the soprano and mezzo-soprano when he heard Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi in Florence in 1832.

6. David Garrick (1716–1779), British Shakespearean actor, who, in accordance with Neoclassical custom, freely adapted the plays. Berlioz himself, in the Tomb Scene of his Roméo et Juliette symphony, would take his inspiration from Garrick’s ending.

7. See Byron’s journal entry of November 16, 1813 (Leslie A. Marchand, Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982], p. 85).

8. This diatribe against arrangers represents an early version of the one in Mem., chapter 16.

9. Berlioz refers to the horn quartet following the Freischütz overture’s opening adagio.

10. The references to “finale” and to the preceding Andante in A minor (actually the second movement, not the preceding Minuet, which leads directly into the fourth movement) make it clear that the work in question was the Razumovsky Quartet in C major, op. 59, no. 3, sometimes called the “Eroica” Quartet. What Berlioz hears as Walter Scott in the Andante is more likely to have been a nod to Beethoven’s Russian sponsor: think Russian steppes rather than Scottish moors. As for the finale itself, the opening furiously paced fugue is notoriously demanding for solo instruments, let alone a full string section—proof of the extraordinary virtuosity of French string playing at the Conservatoire.

11. Berlioz’s earlier formulation, though less polished stylistically, makes the meaning clear: “It is as if Michelangelo had decided to borrow the palette of Poussin and created a great, admirable landscape” (#4).

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