The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (Cambridge Companions to Music) by Peter Bloom

Author:Peter Bloom [Peter Bloom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

11 The criticism

KATHARINE ELLIS

For Berlioz, music journalism was a double-edged sword: a financial necessity and a burden, on the one hand; an opportunity to make his views heard and to change public taste, on the other. During nearly four decades of activity as a music critic he left over nine hundred journalistic items ranging from opera and concert reviews to stories, discussions of aesthetics, and technical articles on conducting, organology, and pitch. 1 Musical insight and literary flair combined to produce a body of criticism unparalleled in its richness but tinged, for the modern reader, with the regret that in writing so much journalism Berlioz necessarily wrote less music. Yet in using criticism to justify his art, Berlioz was at the forefront of a nineteenth-century tradition presaged by E. T. A. Hoffmann and continued by both Schumann and Wagner – a tradition of educative and even propagandistic writing (at its Wagnerian extreme) that acknowledged and attempted to close the gap between avant-garde composition and a predominantly bourgeois public with considerable purchasing power but conservative taste.

The peril of such didactic writing lay in the critic’s duty to denounce what he saw as artistically suspect, which in Berlioz’s case meant the music of contemporaries almost all of whom were more commercially successful than he. As a critic of integrity, Berlioz had little option but to allow his readership to know, or at least to glean, his own points of view; as a composer in need of support from more established figures at the Opéra, Conservatoire, and Académie des Beaux-Arts, he could ill afford to be perceived as a petulant spoiler of reputations. Inevitably, the critic’s mantle, which gave him the power to judge others (and a defensive “weapon,” as he notes in chapter 47 of the Mémoires , without which he felt unacceptably vulnerable), became an obstacle to his own career. His central problem was that he canonized only the dead and lampooned too many of the living.

Although Berlioz contributed to a dozen newspapers during his journalistic career, his regular paid work came from only two, on which I shall concentrate here: the Bertin brothers’ daily and politically mobile Journal des débats , for which he was music critic from 1835 (and, in addition, opera critic from 1837) until 1863; and Maurice Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris , on whose masthead his name appeared from its foundation in 1834 until the year before his death. Readers who subscribed to the Journal des débats looked to the feuilleton running across the bottom of each page for light and largely non-technical relief from the weighty political matters discussed above. By contrast, the Revue et Gazette ’s readers were both musically literate and, at least during Schlesinger’s directorship (through 1846), part of an experiment to bring elements of German romanticism to French musical consciousness. Here, Berlioz’s reviews were emblematic of a new aesthetic in which “professional” critics such as François-Joseph Fétis and Castil-Blaze were supplanted by artists – both literary and musical –

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