Chapter Six - Berlioz in the Plural
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2023
Summary
One of the striking features of Berlioz's Mémoires is the indiscriminateness of his literary imagination. In 1827, Romeo and Juliet infused in Berlioz a dream of Italy, an ideal domain where the heaviness of the commonplace fumes away into sheer volatility of voluptuousness; and four years later Berlioz was allowed to visit Italy—in fact, he was compelled to live there against his will, for winners of the Prix de Rome, the best route to success for a young French artist, were required to live in Rome. By 1831 Italy meant, to Berlioz, not amorous adventure but the absence of amorous adventure, for his beloved (at this moment not Harriet Smithson but a woman named Camille Moke, whom Berlioz would soon come to consider calculating and unreliable) had to stay in Paris. For this reason, and for many others, including the incompetence of Italian musicians, Berlioz found Italy an exasperation and a trial. And yet Italy provided Berlioz with a huge theatre through which he could swagger, experimenting with various transvestisms between himself and dead poets, or characters in literature. He reads Byron in St. Peter's, and is suddenly overwhelmed with Byron envy:
I devoured at leisure this burning poetry; I followed the bold paths of the Corsair on the waves; I profoundly adored this character at once inexorable and tender, pitiless and generous, a bizarre composite of two sentiments seemingly opposed, hatred of his kind and love of a woman… . Then my thoughts, lowering their flight, took pleasure in seeking, on the basilica's pavement, the traces of the noble poet's steps… .
He must have seen this sculpture by Canova, I said to myself; his feet have walked on this marble, his hands have stroked the contours of this bronze; he has breathed this air, these echoes have repeated his words … words of tenderness and love, perhaps… . Eh! yes! couldn't he have visited the monument with his friend Madame Guiccioli, that rare and admirable woman, who understood him so completely, who loved him so profoundly!!! … loved!!! … poet! … free! … rich! He was all that, himself! … and the grinding of my teeth, as it resounded in the confessional, would make the damned tremble with fear.
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- Musicking ShakespeareA Conflict of Theatres, pp. 74 - 79Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007