Grin and Berlioz It

DURING A Q&A SESSION at the Bard Music Festival, the question was posed: “Do you ever fall asleep when you’re conducting?” The question was aimed at Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and conductor of the orchestral portions of the festival programs. “Do you ever get bored up there?” This took place during a panel discussion titled “A Revolutionary Life in a Revolutionary Era,” and the subject – the subject of two weekends’ worth of programming, in fact – was Hector Berlioz.

The question was inspired by Berlioz’s “Lélio,” a work for narrator, vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra, performed at the festival the evening before. It’s a formidable work (not that you expect anything less from this composer) that resists categorization. It is rarely performed, which is a major reason it was part of the festival’s opening concert, paired with Berlioz’s most famous work, the “Symphonie fantastique,”to which it is intended as a sequel.

Dr. Botstein has an impressively elegant way of suffering fools. His reply was measured, with just a whiff of archness. In the days before media saturation, before recordings were available, he explained, concert pieces were constructed to give listeners some musical signposts. And those listeners (I’m not quoting exactly) had actual attention spans. They didn’t have phones in front of their faces. In other words, it’s not the music that’s the problem. It’s the distracted listener.

Yet if ever there was a composer for the distracted listener, it’s Berlioz. Not for him, generally, the intimate gesture. “Lélio” just happens to be one of his least-accessible works. I wasn’t there for that performance, but I spent the entirety of the following day soaking in the variety of events that characterizes each day of this festival.

The high point was a performance of Berlioz’s Te Deum, finishing the evening’s orchestral concert. How could it not be? “It uses space in interesting ways,” said Sarah Hibberd, introducing the concert. “It has an organ in dialogue with what was intended to be two large choruses, and was also supposed to have a children’s chorus of up to 600. The first performance also featured five sub-conductors, who took the beat from a system of electronic metronomes.” Hibberd is music chair at the University of Bristol, and co-editor of the festival’s essay collection, Berlioz and His World. “Berlioz took inspiration from the classical and religious past,” she explained, noting that he also was speaking to France’s 19th-century colonial ambitions. “He wanted to balance the intellectual with the apocalyptic.” Not surprising from a man who was more ambitious than religious.

The piece is intended to be huge, but the size of hall and budget impose limitations. The Orchestra Now, an ensemble founded by Dr. Botstein, sported nearly seventy players; I couldn’t easily count the chorus, but it too was of number enough to crowd the stage.

Not the thousand performers at the work’s premiere, but we got the idea. Got it right at the start, when a thunderous d-minor chord from the orchestra is echoed by an equally thunderous organ, and it happens again, the chords portentously changing, before the organ invites the chorus to enter in a staggered contrapuntal sequence. It’s demanding. It’s convincing. And, having established that we have massive forces on hand, they’re deployed only as needed. The second section, “Tibi omnes,” begins with a soft organ solo before high winds and high voices come in. But fear not: it soon builds into Berliozian bigness, with five sets of cymbals to crash home the point.

And that’s the pattern throughout the six vocal movements, although the fifth, “Te ergo quaesumus,” is a tenor solo that was beautifully performed by Joshua Blue. We had the bonus of a seventh movement, the usually omitted “March for the Presentation of the Colors,” a remnant of the work’s origin as a military celebration. It’s a stately brass-and-percussion fest, not neglecting input from winds and strings and organ – and even some harps. Twelve is the ambitious request; we had four. They did just fine, balancing well with the orchestra.

Leon Botstein with The Orchestra Now

That Berlioz was leading a revolutionary life in a revolutionary era is indisputable; what’s surprising is that, except in his compositions, he wasn’t really a part of that scene. He was fascinated by revolutionary history, as pointed out during the morning panel by Michael Steinberg, professor of music and German studies at Brown University. An early cantata, La Scène héroïque (La Révolution grecque), celebrated the ten-year war of Greek Independence from the Ottoman Empire, which began in 1821, when the composer was an idealistic 17 years old, but he turned more and more to stories of antiquity, as in his final opera, Les Troyens, which drew from Virgil's Aeneid.

Berlioz lived through much of France’s Second Empire, when Louis Napoleon (nephew of the best-known Napoleon) went from President to Emperor, and instituted sweeping social and physical changes, much of it to combat fear of another popular uprising. Esther da Costa Meyer, former professor of architectural history at Yale, visiting prof at NYU, and professor emerita at Princeton, addressed architectural issues as being emblematic of the era’s changes. Garrisons were erected; railway stations were placed near enough to the new boulevards to allow soldiers to be swiftly installed should unrest occur. Many residents were displaced by the rebuilding, creating a new class of indigents, thus increasing the fear of rebellion. What Berlioz witnessed, she said, “was a world stretched open by the colonial powers.”

Anna Harwell Celenza, who teaches writing and musicology at Princeton, took a literal look at Berlioz, through caricatures and portraits. An 1843 drawing by Daumier shows the composer alongside Victor Hugo and other creative luminaries, but it’s as if they’re a carnival exhibit. Jean Gérard, who signed himself J.J. Grandville, published a caricature in 1845 picturing “Un Concert a mitraille et Berlioz” (“A Concert with Grapeshot and Berlioz”) with a cannon among the low strings and dangerous-looking tubas. (See illustration alongside.)

Most interesting is a caricature by M. Marais, drawn in 1883, fourteen years after Berlioz’s death. It features two panels: “Before,” wherein the public is throwing bricks at the composer; “After,” where we see those bricks being used to build a monument to him, so quickly was this maverick’s posthumous reputation redeemed.

Dr. Botstein also made a point of emphasizing Berlioz’s work as a writer, in particular the critical essays that gained him high regard during his lifetime and his treatise on the instruments of the orchestra.

Grandville's “Un Concert a
mitraille et Berlioz”

If we didn’t have the five hours handy in which to hear “Les Troyens” in its entirety, we at least got three characteristic excerpts during the evening concert. The “Trojan March” was culled and arranged as a stand-alone concert piece, and “Royal Hunt and Storm” also enjoys independent identity; the duet “Nuit d’ivresse et d’extase infinie” (“Intoxicating Night of Infinite Ecstasy”) comes at the end of Act IV, a love duet for Dido and Aeneas, interrupted when Mercury warns them of bad times ahead. Mezzo-soprano Megan Moore and tenor Joshua Blue sang with voices big enough to withstand the large orchestra yet intimate enough to convey convincing passion.

An oddity on the program was the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Written by Claude de Lisle in 1792, it declined in favor until Berlioz arranged it in 1830 for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, giving six of its verses a variety of settings. So stirring was soprano Jana McIntyre that, were she to take this to the streets, the revolution would be a shoo-in.

Berlioz was a passionate admirer of the music of Gluck, so it was fitting to open the concert with Gluck’s overture to “Iphigenia in Aulis,” and the first half closed with Auber’s bubbly “Fra Diavolo” overture.

Soprano McIntyre had a showcase earlier in the day when she sang “Ocean! thou mighty monster!” (in English) from Weber’s “Oberon.” It’s a big, dramatic number, and McIntyre demonstrated not only an admirable voice but also just the right amount of gestural acting to enhance her performance. She was also featured in the more wistful aria “Connais-tu le pays” by Ambrose Thomas, from his opera “Mignon,” both to skilled piano accompaniment by Erika Switzer.

McIntyre joined mezzo-soprano Rebecca Ringle Kamarei in two songs by Berlioz: “Le montagnard exilé” with harpist Noël Wan, and an anonymously texted Nocturne, this to guitar accompaniment by Daniel Lippel. Guitar was Berlioz’s instrument (along with flute), making him still more unique among composers.

Jean-François Le Sueur and Gaspare Spontini were older Berlioz contemporaries, among a number of Italian-born composers working in Paris. An aria by each showed the vocal and dramatic skill of baritone Tyler Duncan, particularly Spontini’s stirring “Non, non je vis encore” from his opera “Le vestale.” Erika Switzer again was the attentive pianist.

Harpist Wan opened the concert with Elias Alvars’s “Introduction and Variations on Bellini’s Opera Norma.” Berlioz considered Alvars “the Liszt of the harp,” a good enough reason to include this virtuosic piece, brilliantly performed.

Berlioz scholar Jonathan Kregor’s pre-concert talk considered composers who influenced Berlioz, which is challenging because his music shows little of these influences. But there were people like Luigi Cherubini and Anton Reicha among his teachers at the Paris Conservatory, about whom Berlioz wasn’t always kind. But that was enough reason to program Cherubini’s Horn Sonata No. 2, from 1804, featuring Zohar Schondorf as solist with the Balourdet Quartet, and Reicha’s little-heard but vastly engaging String Quartet in C Minor, from 1803, again with the enthusiastic Balourdet Quartet.

Weber’s brief “Invitation to the Dance” is most often heard in its orchestral version, an arrangement made by Berlioz, but we got to see Michael Stephen Brown perform the original piano version, a reminder of just how flashy the piece is for a keyboard artist.

I noticed a number of attendees skipping the pre-concert talks at Bard. That’s a bad idea. They are almost always immediately engaging and serve to illuminate the music to come, much of it selected because of its rarity. And those talks offered a portrait of the complicated world in which Berlioz existed.

Fitting into that world, for him, was another matter. There was no precedent. “I would like to begin my conclusion,” writes Julian Rushton in his book The Musical Language of Berlioz, “by discussing where Berlioz comes in the history of musical forms, and what is his progeny. The shortest answer is, nowhere, and none ... The entire ‘History of Rhythm in Western Music’ in The New Grove is accomplished without mention of Berlioz.” Rushton’s conclusion: “In his work as in his life Berlioz was a lone wolf.”
 
I’ll give Leon Botstein the last word on this, drawn from his essay in the festival’s companion book, Berlioz and His World: “His music is the foundation of the modern orchestra’s range and variety of sound. He was the virtuoso of the orchestra: what Paganini was to the violin and Liszt to the piano.”