The entry for Hector Berlioz in the first edition of Grove's
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1879, closes thus: "He
stands alone — a colossus with few friends and no direct followers."
The composer had died 10 years earlier, a lonely man and a misunderstood
artist.
That writer was unusually enlightened for his time. Berlioz, the Romantic
revolutionary who had created vast and poetic musical panoramas of a totally
unprecedented nature and who had invented a completely new palette of orchestral
expression and color, had been rejected by the French academic establishment,
largely shunned by musical promoters and often ridiculed by audiences. It's no
surprise, then, that he chose as his epitaph Macbeth's final estimation of life
as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Many decades were to pass before Berlioz's music began to be accepted into the regular repertoire of symphony orchestras and opera houses. Even half a century ago it was a rare and notable occasion when, for instance, his Symphonie funebre et triomphale or his opera Les Troyens was performed. There were still many people, and indeed many musicians, who felt that Berlioz, with the exception of a few overtures and the Symphonie fantastique, was unwieldy, uncontrolled and unsubstantial. By the mid-20th century, there had only been a few conductors of international prowess who championed the bulk of Berlioz's output with love and respect — notably Hamilton Harty and Thomas Beecham, both outstanding interpreters who revealed the subtleties and inspiration of his writing.
Colin Davis adored Berlioz's music, and in the late
1950s he began to emerge as one of the composer's finest and most vital
advocates. Before long the conductor was spearheading a new movement of
worldwide interest in Berlioz; his activities were one of the most important
factors in the composer's very belated rise to popularity. Gradually Davis took
on almost all of Berlioz's orchestral, choral and operatic oeuvre; his
performances were acclaimed for their blend of sensitivity and delicacy with
brilliance and fire. Yet 
that passionate intensity
was always underpinned by meticulous control, revealing the disciplined
classicism as well as the wild romanticism in Berlioz's art.
As four decades passed, Davis — now Sir Colin — gained a reputation as perhaps the greatest living Berlioz conductor. He has earned ecstatic acclaim from critics and audiences, especially for the Berlioz mini-festivals he has programmed, performed and recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he is principal conductor. For the 2003 Berlioz bicentennial, Davis and the LSO are paying special tribute to the composer with a series of three programs in London (February) and New York (March); he returns to the U.S. in April to lead the New York Philharmonic in Béatrice et Bénédict. andante contributor Jonathan Tolansky spoke with the conductor in London about his long love affair with the music that he has so famously mastered.
Jon Tolansky: How did you discover Berlioz?
Colin Davis: I just happened to hear the second part of L'enfance du Christ in Bryanston Summer School in 1951. I had never heard any music like that — I had never heard melody of that kind and I battened on to it very quickly.
JT: Do you view Berlioz as a Classicist as well as a Romantic?
CD: Yes. He remained a Classicist all his life; his roots were firmly there with Gluck, Beethoven and Weber. But he was the most original composer of his time. When you look back, if you think of his contemporaries — Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and early Wagner — Berlioz really dominated the history of music in the early part of the 19th century. It was only later in Wagner's life, long after he had absorbed a lot of what Berlioz had to teach him, that he became such a huge figure. Berlioz was a fearless innovator and man for using every expressive means he could. When the Symphonie fantastique burst on the scene in 1830, nobody had ever heard anything like it before.
I think I would classify Berlioz as the first and only genuine Romantic. I would say that he introduced into music all the elements that have made Shakespeare famous: his ability to express the wildest emotions, his complete disregard of all inhibiting conventions, his clarity. Nobody had the wit to break out as he did — but then maybe you had to be a Frenchman to do it: Racine had been in a birdcage of rules and regulations that had come down from Aristotle and his contemporaries, and there was Victor Hugo, in great trouble with the establishment because of the way he wrote.
JT: Would you say that Berlioz made his wishes very clear through his indications in his scores?
CD: He never abandoned his French discipline of expressing himself concisely and using the most exact means that he could. His music is written with a very fine ear for detail. It is not the great cataclysm of the Dies Irae in the Grande Messe des Morts [Requiem] that one thinks of in Berlioz, but rather passages in Nuits d'été, L'enfance du Christ, Beatrice and Benedict and, in The Trojans, the part of Ascanius. He wrote far more delicate music than anything else.
JT: One of his very earliest works, the overture to his unfinished opera Les francs juges, still sounds so strange and weird in many places, 175 years after its composition. Just what was it in this piece, even at the start of Berlioz's career, that was so instantaneously novel?
CD: After such a majestic introduction with the striding brass melody, there is then what appears to be a chaotic allegro of really wild and great intensity. But it is all very carefully organized! Although it sounds like chaos, when you study how Berlioz has brought it off it isn't chaos at all. He obtained a lot of his effects by liberating instruments that before had been only slaves, such as the bass drum.
JT: Such as that extraordinary moment midway in the overture when the timpani plays across the beat and the bass drum suddenly appears underneath with quiet but sinister shudders — a color and role it had never had before.
CD: Yes! One of his most inventive schemes was to have rhythmic counterpoint when you have different phrase lengths in different departments of the orchestra — which of course seems chaotic to begin with but then becomes more exciting when you realize what is going on. He does that in Romeo and Juliet with enormous effect in the Queen Mab scherzo.
JT: This must have posed great new puzzles for performers in Berlioz's
time.
CD: Yes, because the players counted their bars' rests, came in and then had a terrible feeling that they were in the wrong place. I can't imagine the nervousness with which those poor chaps approached a work by Berlioz — but when he wasn't conducting he usually played in the percussion section, so I think he probably hardened his troops at the back!
JT: You mentioned before how the delicate moments in Berlioz are so quintessential — especially so when they contrast with the colossal sounds in, for instance, the "Tuba mirum" of the Grande Messe des Morts.
CD: After the onslaught you are left with cor anglais and bassoon and tenors and basses, and there's an emptiness which is hardly filled by interstellar dust. Then, later on in the Sanctus, there is the very, very thin fabric of the violins holding endlessly long notes. The slender and thin-sounding quality in so much of his music comes from a very high-pitched bass line. All his work is pitched up — as opposed to, say, Sibelius, who is so deep down that he is under the table. There is a kind of Mediterranean lightness in, for instance, Romeo and Juliet. I think a lot of that clarity comes from the pitch of the instruments that he uses — there isn't any mud. And then, going back to the Grande Messe des Morts, there is that astonishing effect at the end of the "Hostias," with the flutes and the trombones at extreme opposite ends. It sounds really bizarre, but in a favorable acoustic like St. Paul's Cathedral it is extraordinary — the heights and the depths, and they are infinitely far apart.
JT: Is it true that Berlioz was a nonbeliever, despite having been inspired by the religious text?
CD: I think that, even through he grew away from or out of his belief like Verdi or Beethoven, he never forgot what it was like to believe. He still remembered what it was like to be afraid of the Last Judgement and to feel the intolerable weight of sin he was dragging around him. Similarly with Verdi: I do not feel Verdi could have written a Requiem had he not known what it was like to be a good Catholic as a boy. Things that happen to minds that are so especially fresh remain as vivid as ever through one's life.
JT: Why do you think it is that, despite his revolutionary influence on the development of music, there has never been any composer remotely reminiscent of Berlioz since?
CD: He is a one-off — you can't imitate him. People have taken lots of ideas from Berlioz and used them in their own works, but nobody actually wanted to be like Berlioz. He was a much-vilified composer for so long, because he challenged everyone's cozy illusions about what music could do.
For instance, look at The Damnation of Faust — here Berlioz has a
sense of the demonic that is especially his, I think; perhaps only Mozart comes
near to that. You have to use so much imagination in your delivery of it. I
think that is why Berlioz is so difficult to perform, because there can never be
enough imagination. You have to be a very disciplined musician, but there is no
point in performing his music if you cannot make it mean what Berlioz intended.
We are never quite sure what that is, but we try to get as near to it as we
possibly can.
andante members can listen to streaming audio of Colin Davis and the London
Symphony in five different Berlioz programs (see the list of "related articles" below). For information on becoming an
andante member, click here.
