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Berlioz and Virgil a Consideration of ‘Les Troyens’ as a Virgilian Opera

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1968

David Cairns
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Extract

It has been said that by naming him Hector, Berlioz's father determined his fate, marked him out for glory and tragedy, heroic deeds and the bitterness of failure and mutilation. A fanciful idea, no doubt; but the more one considers Berlioz's life, the more it seems almost mystically inevitable that his crowning work should be an epic on the Trojan war and its aftermath, the wanderings of Aeneas and the myth of the founding of Rome, and the more one comes to see his discovery of Virgil during adolescence and his precocious response to the passion and tenderness of the Aeneid as the most important single event of his imaginative existence. As Gounod justly remarks, Berlioz, like his great namesake Hector, died beneath the walls of Troy; for the final blow in a lifetime of vain struggles against a hostile musical environment was its rejection of the very work which he knew to be his culminating achievement and artistic justification. When we read the letters written during the two years of its composition we cannot help sensing something special about them. In their mood of exhilaration and their sense of destiny fulfilled they recall the passage at the end of The Gathering Storm where Churchill describes his feelings on taking power in May 1940: ‘I felt … that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 95 , 1968 , pp. 97 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, tr. & ed. David Cairns, London, 1969, p. 468 and n. 8.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Les soirées de l'orchestre, Paris, 1852, pp. 114 and 341, and Correspondance inédite de Hector Berlioz, Paris, 1879, p. 215.Google Scholar

3 See letter of 28 February 1855 to Fiorentino, La revue blanche, ii (1912), 424.Google Scholar

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5 Aeneid, iv. 579–83; quoted in Berlioz, Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie, Paris, 1844, ii. 183, and in Memoirs, p. 171.Google Scholar

6 Memoirs, p. 35.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 515.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., p. 201.Google Scholar

9 Aeneid, i. 630; a misquotation for non ignara …Google Scholar

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13 Ibid., iii. 301–5.Google Scholar

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