"... so merkt man ihr allerdings den achtzehnjährigen, unbeholfenen Komponisten an..."

In the course of the aesthetic controversy of the 19th century over programme music, which was particularly intense in Vienna, 'conservative' as well as 'progressive' ciritcs, who wrote for the daily press, endeavoured to appropriate Hector Berlioz for their personal aesthetic convictions. Even for reviews written in the 1860s and 1870s, when Berlioz's large-scale works were first performed by leading Viennese orchestras, Robert Schumann's review of the Symphonie fantastique (1835) played a significant role. Schumann's appreciative assessment of the symphony, which was strongly influenced by his misconception that Berlioz was only eighteen years old at the time of composition of the Symphony fantastique, had a decisive influence on the journalistic discourse on Berlioz in Vienna far beyond the first half of the century, for example on Hugo Wolf and Edmund Schelle. Other critics, such as August Wilhelm Ambros and Eduard Hanslick, took Schumann's ambiguity as their starting point to validate their less positive judgements.

"verruchte Theorie" einer musikalischen "Gottheit"

Im 19. Jahrhundert waren es vor allem zwei Komponisten, die sich intensiv mit Christoph Willibald Glucks Opernreform auseinander setzten: Hector Berlioz und Richard Wagner. Während dem einen die Reform - zumindest in der Theorie - schon zu weit ging, war sie dem anderen noch nicht progressiv genug. Berlioz' Urteil über Gluck erweist sich jedoch als vielschichtig. Neben Lobreden auf den "Gott des Ausdrucks" stehen kritische Bemerkungen zu dessen "verruchter Theorie", als deren legitime, wenngleich negative Umsetzung Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk erscheint. Dabei lässt sich bei Berlioz eine Trennung zwischen Theorie und Praxis feststellen. Indem Gluck hinter den eigenen Postulaten zurückbleibt, gewinnen seine Kompositionen (großenteils) paradigmatischen Charakter.

"Mit dem Konzertrepertoire ist es wie mit der Bildergalerie..."

Das Museum war in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts in Paris eine sehr populäre Institution, der nicht zuletzt im Zusammenhang mit dem aufblühenden Historismus allgemeine Bedeutung zugebilligt wurde. Seine Funktion erschöpfte sich nicht im Konservieren von Kunstwerken und deren Darbietung zur ästhetischen Kontemplation, sondern wurde auch in der vorbildlichen Demonstration zur Vermittlung ästhetischer Bildung gesehen. Dies ging so weit, dass das Museumskonzept unmittelbar als Mittel zur generellen Stimulierung des künstlerischen wie wirtschaftlichen Fortschritts, als Vehikel der Zivilisation angesehen wurde; ein positiv konnotierter Fortschritt, der auf dem Bewusstsein der Vergangenheit fußte und von dieser profitierte. Im Zuge seiner Popularität und Funktionsvielfalt wurde der Museumsgedanke seit den 1830er Jahren auch verstärkt auf Musik projiziert, unter anderem von Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt und Camille Saint-Saëns. Im Blickpunkt standen dabei Konzertinstitutionen wie die Société des Concerts du Conservatoire oder auch musikalische Editionen, in die museale Prinzipien einflossen. Neben der Pflege oder Konservierung von Musik wurde dabei ebenfalls deren Innovationspotential für die zeitgenössische Musikkultur reflektiert und akzentuiert.

Vom Feuilleton zum Palimpsest

Mit philologischen Methoden wird die Entwicklung von Hector Berlioz' "Traité d'instrumentation" nachgezeichnet. Ursprünglich eine Artikelserie, erschien er 1843 in Buchform. Unter den deutschen Übersetzungen wurde ausgerechnet diejenige - von Richard Strauss - die bedeutendste, die die am weitesten gehende Bearbeitung darstellt. bms online (Schöner, Oliver)

Modernization of biographical narratology: Reflections on Arnold Zweig’s artistic novella Symphonie Fantastique

This article is devoted to the German-Jewish writer Arnold Zweig’s (1887–1968) biographical novella Symphonie Fantastique (1943), told from the perspective of a young musicologist participating in World War II, applied to the life and work of French composer Hector Berlioz. Arnold Zweig not only writes the biography of one of the most prominent French composers for Harold Breton, but he also confronts the Vichy Regime. The aim of this article is to capture the technique of Arnold Zweig, who combines history and the identification of an artist with a given object.

Conclusion

Genealogies of Music and Memory began with two questions: how was Gluck’s music remembered during the nineteenth century, and did it really collapse in ruins during the 1820s with just one lonely archaeologist, Hector Berlioz, to inspect the fragments and lovingly cherish them for posterity? The answer to the second question—a clear and emphatic negative—is merely a subset of the first, which is the question that the book was designed to answer. The text has sought to examine a broad range of ways in which Gluck was imagined while his works were absent from the Parisian stage, and then to trace the networks, actors, and agents identified there into the various types of more complete—and in some cases staged—productions of the composer’s works from the 1830s to the 1860s. Musical and cultural practices identified in the forty years before the 1859 ...

Genealogies of Music and Memory

The history of music is most often written as a sequence of composers and works. But a richer understanding of the music of the past may be obtained by also considering the afterlives of a composer’s works. Genealogies of Music and Memory asks how the stage works of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) were cultivated in nineteenth-century Paris, and concludes that although the composer was not represented formally on the stage until 1859, his music was known from a wide range of musical and literary environments. Received opinion has Hector Berlioz as the sole guardian of the Gluckian flame from the 1820s onwards, and responsible—together with the soprano Pauline Viardot—for the ‘revival’ of the composer’s Orfeo in 1859. The picture is much clarified by looking at the concert performances of Gluck during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, and the ways in which they were received and the literary discourses they engendered. Coupled to questions of music publication, pedagogy, and the institutional status of the composer, such a study reveals a wide range of individual agents active in the promotion of Gluck’s music for the Parisian stage. The ‘revival’ of Orfeo is contextualized among other attempts at reviving Gluck’s works in the 1860s, and the role of Berlioz, Viardot, and a host of others re-examined.

Critical Allusion and Critical Assessment: Berlioz's and Reyer's Reviews of Bizet in the Journal des débats

Respected as one of four ‘feuilles de qualité’ in nineteenth-century France, the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires published articles by some of the most talented writers/critics of its time. In ‘feuilletons’, large articles that ran across the bottom of the first and second pages, these authors gave perceptive critiques in high-quality prose and provided their readers with relief from the political news discussed on the page above. In January 1858 literary critic Hippolyte Rigault asserted that modern criticism communicated not just through forthright judgements but also through innuendo and nuance. A sophisticated readership could then be expected to take up the task of understanding the allusions and filling in the blanks. Like Rigault, Hector Berlioz (music critic of the Débats from 1835 to 1863) and Ernest Reyer (from 1866 to 1898) used both text and subtext to convey their assessments. This study, with the goal of examining how shades of approval and disapproval could be alluded to or directly revealed, traces how they wrote about their younger contemporary Georges Bizet in the years following Rigault's article.