In his 1844 novella Euphonia, or the Musical City: Tale of the Future (Euphonia, ou la ville musicale: Nouvelle de l’avenir), Hector Berlioz imagines a community bound by rigorous musical standards. The Euphonians who inhabit this ‘vast music conservatory’ share one purpose: the perfection of musical expression on a large scale, as demonstrated by a recurrent festival honouring Cristoph Willibald Gluck.Footnote 1 In the city of Euphonia, composers monitor performances of their work; machines guarantee musical excellence; and only select audiences, well-versed in music, attend concerts. It is Berlioz’s urban and musical utopia, ‘an ideal city where music would be the organizing principle of … all human activity’.Footnote 2 Euphonia is thus the antithesis of Paris, where, Berlioz claims, egos and self-interest spoiled music’s integrity. The centrality of Gluck, Berlioz’s earliest musical idol, in Euphonian society indicates his desire for another place and time. So, too, does the fact that this utopic fantasy takes place in the year 2344. Berlioz therefore builds a futuristic city onto which he projects a nostalgia for an alternate musical culture. Thus, his musical utopia responds to an impulse to protect at all costs the music that moves him, and it concurrently serves as a form of symbolic retaliation against the musicians he regularly encountered in Paris and who often disappointed him.
Nostalgia and utopia may seem like opposing concepts, the former directed at memory and the past, and the latter at dreams about a better future. Nostalgia and utopia are, however, interwoven notions, intellectual and affective tools to reflect on the present time, virtual realities, alternative scenarios and multiple spatialities. As the scholarly work on nostalgia, which includes the articles in this issue, shows, nostalgia changed its meaning from its first inception in the seventeenth century, as it left its original association with a spatial discontent (from the Greek nostos, meaning home) to convey the feeling of a temporal-centred yearning. Likewise, utopia etymologically means non-place, but the term is often used to imply both spatial and temporal projections of alternative outcomes drawn from contemporary anxiety, dissatisfaction and desires. Nostalgia thrives in memories of the past to imagine a future return to the home, while utopia cannot be understood without retrospection.Footnote 3 Berlioz’s Euphonia is far from being a non-place. This city is the result of the nostalgic desires of the composer, who projected the childhood memories from his hometown onto this dreamed musical city. The fantasy of reaching the city of Euphonia in the year 2344 is, therefore, a form of homecoming for Berlioz.
I argue that the confluence in imagined urban spaces of past musical legacies and new artistic experiences arose from Berlioz’s relationship with Paris, a city that failed to appreciate him, yet from which he could not detach himself or his career. His invented musical city, like his literature-inspired music, thus allowed Berlioz to build creative communities that memorialize bygone musical values but also look forward to a future of euphonic ingenuity. As a composer and writer provoked by drama and storytelling, Berlioz envisions settings that allow his inventiveness to grow to its greatest potential. Whether he comments on his hometown’s idyllic ambiance, Paris’s at once utopic and dystopic nature, or Euphonia’s status as a euphoria-inducing musical paradise that evolves into a nightmare, Berlioz’s creative output emerges in ways that highlight and build upon the specificity of certain locales, each of which is at once a reflection and rejection of the other places. Thus, in this essay I propose that Berlioz’s cities are sites of lived or imagined experience where his innovative art and self-reflective nostalgia can thrive.
The first half of my essay focuses on nostalgia. To start, I examine a tandem that forms between nostalgia and utopia, arguing that Berlioz’s imagination and retrospection operate through a kind of nostalgic retrospectivity that allows him to create a new musical and literary world in Euphonia. I then consider how political and social concerns of the first half of the nineteenth century kindled melancholic desires for alternate times and places in Romantic artists like Berlioz. One such place, I argue, was Berlioz’s hometown where he discovered intuitive passions for figures like Gluck, on whom he will later project nostalgic conceptions of past and future music. From there I explore Berlioz’s relationship to Paris, a cultural capital where artistic phenomena motivated creation, but also a city that represented much of what Berlioz found problematic with the musical establishment. In the context of Euphonia’s publication history, I inspect how the novella’s textual peculiarities are evidence of Berlioz’s inventive autobiographical creativity. In the latter half of this essay, I discuss the theoretical implications of Berlioz’s utopia. In particular, I expand my analysis of Berlioz’s reminiscence into a wider exploration of temporality in the novella: for Berlioz uses the nineteenth-century present to both draw upon retrospection and nostalgia, and to do the opposite – to explore utopic (and dystopic) futures. This engenders a creative tension between past and present, between memory and wishful projection. Thereafter a close reading of the text demonstrates how Berlioz morphs his melodrama into a plan for an urban musical utopia, thus establishing a dichotomy between industrial artifice and natural passions. Lastly, I conclude by positioning Euphonia as a means for Berlioz to gain mastery over an artistic world that too often disappointed him in reality. The result is a virtual reality, a utopia where the arts intermingle with the artist’s very sense of self.
Retrospection, Imagination and the Utopia–Nostalgia Tandem
In Berlioz’s hometown, La Côte-Saint-André, discoveries in music and literature induced artistic, but also personal epiphanies that would inspire a lifetime of attempts to retrieve, relive and retell such exhilarations of creative sensation. Jöel-Marie Fauquet suggests, ‘we must first remember that Berlioz’s own creativity was conditioned by certain “poetic shocks”, as he calls them, which he first experienced as a youth’.Footnote 4 For these ‘shocks’ allow us ‘to understand the unique character of the close relationship between’ Berlioz and a figure like Gluck. These initial ‘episodes’ of ‘frenetic imagination’ evolved when Berlioz moved to Paris where he came to face a musical culture that championed contemporary composers like Gioachino Rossini.Footnote 5 As Berlioz made efforts to shift Parisian favour back to musicians like Gluck, his disillusionment in musical institutions and audiences nonetheless grew. Given this atmosphere, Berlioz’s creative spirit retreated elsewhere when he composed, resulting, David Cairns maintains, in a certain ‘nostalgia and conscious archaism’ in works like Les Troyens (The Trojans).Footnote 6
However, Berlioz soon understood that writing about music paid more than composing and performing it. Richard Aldrich even posits that ‘through [his writings], even more than through his music, [Berlioz] impressed himself and his ideas upon the world’.Footnote 7 Over the course of 40 years, he published nearly a thousand pieces of journalism in which he appraised performances of music, new and old, often finding that a musician has misunderstood or, worse, intentionally ignored a composer’s original. He also wrote of his own evolution as an artist. These ‘autobiographical accounts’, as Francesca Brittan calls them, are ‘permeated by self-staging theatrical language and by the conscious construction of a performative pathology’.Footnote 8 Drama, intellect and sharp observation thus characterize Berlioz’s criticism and autobiographical writing. So does a cutting sense of humour.
Readers would find all of these in Euphonia, Berlioz’s multidimensional textual experiment that melds space and time but also allows for meditation on artistic integrity and control. The text also proposes the regimented worship of musical legacies through the means of technology. A ‘junction between musical language and literary language’, Euphonia approaches a ‘music of the future that … conventions and customs’ of the era otherwise denied Berlioz, according to Béatrice Didier.Footnote 9 This avant-garde spirit marks his 1843 Treatise on Instrumentation. Pierre Boulez indicates that the Treatise’s essay on the orchestra ‘is typical of Berlioz’s character, mixing realism and imagination without opposing one to the other, producing the double aspect of an undeniable inventive “madness”’.Footnote 10 I suggest a similar reading of Euphonia. Yet my analysis of this imagined city reveals that Berlioz’s supposed ‘madness’ is simply an echo of his intellectual and imaginative creativity.
The composer’s nostalgic impulse to create for the nineteenth-century reader a futuristic artistic landscape rooted in previous musical cultures corresponds to Niklas Salmose and Eric Sandberg’s suggestion that nostalgia itself possesses a ‘complex and at times counter-intuitive time signature, in which the future can become the past in the midst of the present’.Footnote 11 Similarly, Janelle Lynn Wilson posits that ‘the phenomenon of nostalgia encapsulates a recalling of the past, in the present, with the potential of anticipating the future’.Footnote 12 With its emphasis on Gluck, a plotline evoking Berlioz’s professional and personal life and an exploration of the possibilities of mechanical innovation, Euphonia intertwines past, present and future not just in terms of thematic content, but also as it relates to the author’s career-length project of autobiographical self-examination. Berlioz created a future version of himself as a lead composer-conductor in Euphonia, a figure who enjoys the kinds of professional conditions that regularly eluded Berlioz in Paris. Furthermore, reflections of the author’s love life are manifested in Euphonia’s two heroes turned rival lovers whose entanglement with a soprano in disguise culminates in a traumatic event that ultimately morphs this tale of the future into a dystopia.
Leonardo Massantini suggests, ‘the nostalgic past is constantly re-evaluated based on our current needs, vulnerabilities, and future plans’.Footnote 13 According to Jill Bradbury, ‘by living imaginatively beyond the confines of the present, we may be able to conceive of ourselves, our identities, in new terms’.Footnote 14 In Euphonia, Berlioz ‘live[s] imaginatively beyond the confines’ of his reality as he fashions a universe where the artistic values he holds most dear are upheld and celebrated; naturally he conceives of himself as the central figure of this nostalgic-utopian artistic realm. Further still, Berlioz’s nostalgic creativity extends beyond recollections – and future projections – of the self and its relation to time; it also turns toward alternate spaces. He situates Euphonia in a future German empire (with an Italian counterpart). Furthermore, Evenings with the Orchestra (Les Soirées de l’orchestre), the 1852 large-scale volume that would eventually contain the novella and other texts, is situated in the imagined city of X****, where the orchestra members of the opera house tell each other stories, like Euphonia, during performances of ‘mediocre’ compositions.Footnote 15 This narrative framework allows Berlioz (and the reader) to experience evenings among likeminded musicians who match his love for storytelling (and humorous irreverence) and share his ‘religious respect’ for Gluck. X**** therefore becomes another affective site of nostalgic homecoming. Though readers never know the location of this locale, we are almost certain it is not in Paris, but, rather, an amalgamation of any of the foreign cities that welcomed Berlioz throughout his career. ‘In nostalgia, time, place and memory are intertwined’, affirms Stefan Schmidt.Footnote 16 As such, Euphonia is only one of Berlioz’s numerous exercises in nostalgic world-building.
In Evenings with the Orchestra Berlioz recycled and reformatted many tales and other forms of writing from his past that fit this mould. The same is true of his masterful Memoirs (1870), an autobiographical bricolage of new and previously published texts. In this regard, ‘the utopic dimension of [Berlioz’s] literary œuvre is reinforced by intertextuality’.Footnote 17 Members of the X**** orchestra share various narratives during uninteresting operas; Xilef and Shetland, the two protagonists of Euphonia, correspond by letters; the 1844 serialized form of the novella was read in journals alongside other accounts of the Paris music scene. More broadly, Euphonia naturally relates to other utopian texts as well as various forms of fiction – Berlioz was an avid reader. Esteban Buch thus affirms that ‘Euphonia’s evocative power lies at the intersection of utopia and the novel’.Footnote 18 For Bruno Messina, Evenings with the Orchestra, read alongside the Memoirs, reveals the composer’s ‘literary genius’, and Euphonia and the other tales told by the X**** orchestra members represent ‘the luminous face’ of Berlioz’s literary corpus.Footnote 19 This multilayered, hybrid artistic universe offered a unique perspective for nineteenth-century readers, as well as readers of the future, particularly as it relates to the composer-author’s developing doctrine on achieving ideal music via ideal means. Of course, Berlioz limited his musical ideal to the music he appreciated and openly criticized or mocked ‘bad music’.Footnote 20
Nostalgic retrospectivity and self-reference thus emerge as dominating trends in Berlioz’s construction of idealized literary and musical worlds. His work follows a pattern theorized by Lola San Martín Arbide, who proposes that ‘the tandem of nostalgia and utopia defined the contradictory spirit of the Romantic movement. Its yearning for a lost Eden went side by side with utopia and the promise that better times lied ahead’.Footnote 21 Euphonia, much like the concept of utopia itself, is emblematic of this contradiction, where a nostalgic understanding of the past meets an idealized future. Berlioz’s euphonic project therefore suggests that, given a particular set of artistic standards, including the centrality of the composer and conductor, music might reach its truest expressive form, that works by Gluck or Beethoven might eventually be presented as their authors intended. Along these lines, then, ‘better times [might lie] ahead’, just as better music that already existed might reach new heights in the future. Or perhaps this is all simply a wish embedded in Berlioz’s nostalgic retrospection and imagination. For, as Frederic Jameson insists, ‘all our images of Utopia, all possible images of Utopia, will always be ideological and distorted by … the author’s partiality’.Footnote 22
I therefore suggest that Berlioz’s utopian vision for the artistic world of the nineteenth century, but also of the past and future, centres first on himself and his memory. Accordingly, Fauquet proposes that for Berlioz, ‘there is no history but his history. Berlioz the artist is thus born fully armed with the first emotions he felt, and his sonic world with them’.Footnote 23 Thus, Berlioz’s utopia is based on his nostalgia. For nostalgia is memory and imagination at play. As Dylan Trigg affirms, imagination not only ‘flesh[es] out what memory alone cannot represent’; it also forms ‘nostalgia’s past’.Footnote 24 This past in turn ‘belongs to the present and is constituted by it’. I would add that, for Berlioz, nostalgia’s future also belongs to and is constituted by the present. In this regard, childhood artistic experiences, those hallmarks of autobiographical memory, are vital to Berlioz’s creative outlook. When Berlioz ‘promotes’ past music, he does so ‘in a way that is personal to him, always linked to a specific occasion and … space’, as suggested by David Charlton.Footnote 25 Hence, the ‘nostalgia-utopia tandem’ at the cornerstone of Berlioz’s creative imagination and retrospection unfolds temporally and spatially.Footnote 26 This becomes immediately evident in the early sections of his Memoirs where Berlioz reminisces on an ‘instinctive passion’ for creators like Gluck that arose within the context of specific events and locales.Footnote 27
His History: A Conjunction of the Mal du Siècle and the Mal du Pays
To set the stage for his Memoirs, Berlioz first establishes current events in his preface, written from London and dated 21 March 1848, mere weeks after the revolution that toppled the July Monarchy and led way to the second French Republic. Berlioz writes the following: ‘Republicanism passes through Europe like a steamroller. The art of music, which for so long has been dying, is now dead’; he continues: ‘There is no more France, no more Germany. Russia is too far’.Footnote 28 The mal du siècle, the melancholy that so often shapes romantic discourse in the early nineteenth century, is here heightened by an upheaval at home. Berlioz sensed a drastic shift in the political and artistic landscape. As David Harvey posits, ‘the counterrevolution that set in after 1848 had the effect of turning upside down many of the hopes and desires, and reining in the proliferating sense of possibilities, that had been so fulsomely articulated in the 1830s and 1840s’.Footnote 29 Yet violent disruption of everyday life did not start in France in 1848, as French history from 1789 onwards demonstrates. Indeed, ‘the French Revolution sundered past from present; after the guillotine and Napoleon the previous world seemed irretrievably remote – hence to many doubly dear’, according to David Lowenthal.Footnote 30 It was in this atmosphere that artists like Berlioz began to experience and then embrace melancholic yearnings for alternate times and spaces.
If Berlioz was imagining new possibilities in music in 1830 with his Symphonie Fantastique, for example, so, too, were progressive theorists, such as the Saint-Simonians, like Charles Duveyrier, with whom Berlioz became acquainted in 1831. Berlioz even offered to write music for the cause.Footnote 31 If his adherence to Saint-Simonian thought was only short-lived, ‘his critical writings reflect aspects of [its] aesthetics’.Footnote 32 A growing anxiety over his own era therefore parallels his nostalgic longings for other places. While individual figures like Berlioz might have thought their homesick suffering – their mal du pays – exceptional, this trend was, in fact, somewhat ubiquitous, and the nostalgic artistic genius became a romantic cliché. The experiences of artists like Berlioz or Alphonse de Lamartine, the quintessential mal-du-siècle poet referenced at the beginning of Euphonia (and who also briefly led the Second Republic in 1848), are indicative of Svetlana Boym’s notion that ‘the spread of nostalgia had to do not only with dislocation in space but also with the changing conception of time’.Footnote 33
In an era caught between forward thinking and repression, when projections of utopic futures countered disappointment with the limitations of the present, artistic figures and social planners felt a natural impulse to theorize invented cities, like Euphonia, but also the Phalenstères of Charles Fourier, for example. Desire for spaces that fulfil a nostalgic ‘reverie of the past’, to borrow a term used by James Hart, became a dominating social and artistic trope.Footnote 34 In Berlioz’s case, he found refuge not only in places rich in his memory – ‘Every country he sets foot in seems from one day to the next apt to play the part of this abandoned elsewhere’, as Guillaume Bordry puts it – but also in the imaginary Euphonia.Footnote 35 Yet Berlioz’s case is especially unique in that his nostalgic memory works via another tandem, a system whereby music takes refuge in literature, and literature takes refuge in music; to satisfy his nostalgic desires, he himself takes refuge in these musico-literary utopias where time and space, memory and the present, are joined and then projected both outwardly for the public and inwardly for his personal and artistic survival. As with many self-reflective artists, the original locus of nostalgia was earliest recollections form childhood. Thus, he shifts from politically motivated alarm in his preface to self-nurturing retrospection on initial artistic passions as his Memoirs unfold.
La Côte-Saint-André: An ‘Instinctive Passion’ for Gluck Develops
In the chapter that follows his preface, Berlioz reminisces on his hometown, La Côte Saint-André, located in the department of Isère. It was ‘built on the slope of a hill, overlooking a vast, rich plain … the silence of which possesses a certain dreamlike majesty’.Footnote 36 A fundamental locus of original happiness and site of initial moments of imaginative self-awakening, this geographically dramatic region came to represent Berlioz’s idealized childhood innocence. La Côte would also become the first location onto which he imprinted his earliest desires through acts of nostalgic remembrance and storytelling of the past. The solitary third movement ‘Scene in the Country’ of the Symphonie fantastique (1830) recalls this natural world, as does Euphonia, which Berlioz situates along a slope of the Harz mountains in Germany. Harz, which inspired other romantic artists like Goethe, therefore becomes a double for Berlioz’s hometown region, Dauphiné. In situating Euphonia in these German highlands, Berlioz thus creates an alternate home in which to cultivate his autobiographical nostalgia for the primarily Germanic music that moves his soul and which he first discovered as a child in La Côte.
Within this bucolic setting around La Côte, an early series of epiphanies relating to literature and music began to shape Berlioz’s burgeoning sense of self, which he recalls through nostalgic, retroactive retelling. For ‘once lived, the past does not temporally expire … It stretches out into the present, resonating in such a way that personal identity and collective identity become reinforced’.Footnote 37 Berlioz recalls the ‘marvellous power of true expression’ he experienced as a choir sung during his first communion.Footnote 38 These art forms that communicate veritable truth and human passion, rather than simply entertain, later formed an axis of Berlioz’s creative philosophy and would serve as the foundational principle of Euphonia.
Navigatory fantasies that formed while Berlioz was studying maps accompanied the next crucial step in his nostalgic formation, an epiphany he experienced while translating book IV of The Aeneid. He was struck by a ‘nervous shudder’ as a wave of ‘Virgilian sorrow’ overtook him.Footnote 39 Yet, just prior to this point in his Memoirs, Berlioz claims to have already sensed these ‘epic passions’. I suggest that a preexisting nostalgia resided within him and that this early discovery ‘affirms a primal poetic fervor but also represents the first of many attempts to repeat it’.Footnote 40 Later Berlioz located in works like Iphigénie en Tauride the same yearning for an imagined ancient past, and he saw in the figure of Gluck a mentorlike creative force and companion. While Virgil might have roused Berlioz’s innate literary sensibilities, it was a formal discovery of Gluck that kindled a preexisting passion for music and inspired the possibility of musical composition.
Berlioz read a biography of Gluck by a certain Delaunaye with ‘the greatest agitation’, adding ‘What beauteous art! What happiness to cultivate on a grand scale!’.Footnote 41 This frenetic state intensified when he came upon a sheet of unfilled music staffs, prompting him to exclaim: ‘What an orchestra one might write on that’. Perhaps Berlioz already sensed the master of orchestration he would become as he imagined and henceforth sought the creative process. He continues, ‘the musical fermentation in my head only grew’. The abundance of creative stimulation that awaited him in Paris would augment this fermentation, while a long series of obstacles would complicate it.
Paris: A City of Nostalgic Possibility and Discontent
I now take a brief detour from my analysis of Berlioz and his creations to establish the disappointments he faced in his real-life career. These biographical elements will lend useful context to my subsequent close reading of Euphonia. As Berlioz narrates his move to Paris in his Memoirs, he again comments on the 1848 Revolution that shook the city and the nation. Traveling from London, he signals: ‘I now return to the unfortunate country that we still call France … I’ll see how an artist can live there’.Footnote 42 At the instant of writing, he experiences a ‘sense of feeling oneself a stranger in a new period that contrasted negatively with an earlier time in which one felt, or imagined, oneself at home’.Footnote 43 Berlioz’s remembrance of the past is therefore punctuated by a painful realization of the present, as ‘a sort of homesickness for a lost past’ interrupts the very telling of that past. He then proceeds: ‘Let us continue my autobiography. … An examination of the past will furthermore serve to distract my attention from the present’.Footnote 44
Ever shifting in moods, Berlioz returns to his story: During his first days as a medical student in Paris, a first outing to see Antonio Salieri’s Les Danaïdes (1784) reminded him of ‘all of the traits of the ideal I had made of Gluck’s style’.Footnote 45 At the library of the Paris Conservatory he obsessed over Gluck’s scores, for which he claims to have ‘an instinctive passion’.Footnote 46 A ‘euphoria overtook’ him.Footnote 47 And under the influence of his rhapsodic reaction to Gluck’s music, he states in a letter: ‘Short of fainting, I couldn’t have experienced a greater impression than when I saw … Gluck’s [Iphigénie en Tauride]’ at the Paris Opéra.Footnote 48 Needless to say, Berlioz abandoned medicine for music. This pattern of epiphanic hyperreaction would become a source of nostalgic autobiographical reflection and creativity.
Berlioz officially enrolled in the Paris Conservatory in 1826. He enjoyed close relationships with some of his mentors and was often at odds with others. Life in Paris also permitted Berlioz to experience even more of the ‘memorable, formative, related events in [his] creative life’ the city afforded, such as the Society of Conservatory Concerts performances of Beethoven.Footnote 49 At the Opéra he and friends formed a nearly religious clique, of which Berlioz was naturally ‘the pontiff’ and ‘the Jupiter of our Olympus was Gluck’.Footnote 50 By 1830, he had written a first version of La Symphonie fantastique. After four attempts, he won the Prix de Rome that year with his Mort de Sardanopale cantata, a reminder of his deep interest in subjects of antiquity. The prize required winners to study at the Académie de France in Rome for two years. Yet Berlioz found Italian musical culture, as ample as it was, inferior to the musical ideas in works by Gluck or Beethoven. Thus, Berlioz wrote to his friend Ferdinand Hiller: ‘Must I be cooped up in this bleak, anti-musical country while in Paris they’re playing the Choral Symphony’, a reference to the Paris premiere of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, which Berlioz regretfully missed.Footnote 51 He even wrote to Victor Hugo: ‘Imagine that I am in Rome, exiled for two years from the musical world’, that ‘I am dying for air, like a bird attached to a pneumatic vacuum pump, deprived of music, poetry, theatres, agitations, everything’.Footnote 52 Still, life in Italy only confirmed the young composer-critic’s opinion of Italian music and his desperate need to work in the French capital, to which he returned in 1832.
As time passed, the Gluckian fervour Berlioz cultivated in Paris saw the transformation of his youthful, if somewhat uninformed, infatuation with Gluck into tangible theories on music and its potential to create meaning. In a two-part 1834 series of articles in the Gazette musicale de Paris, Berlioz argues that Gluck was responsible for ‘the veritable emancipation of the musical arts’.Footnote 53 Rather than erasing the trend of opera, largely Italian, that strictly showcases the virtuosic talents of singers, the Germanic composer proposed an alternate operatic form in which the thematic content – the story – held the same weight as the music. As such, Gluck ‘hastened the moment when poetry and music will be two synonymous words for all ardent souls and elevated intelligences’. Consequently, the text exposes how Gluck confirms Berlioz’s own artistic philosophy: words and music form an inseparable tandem.
A cultural hub that invited the arts to intermingle, Paris and the artistic phenomena it showcased encouraged Berlioz to reflect not just on ways in which music and words allow each other to expand, but also how they reveal his deepest passions. The city thus presented Berlioz with outlets for reflection on his relation to art and motivated him to become a creator, a figure that might provoke the same emotions in others that his artistic idols did in him. The compositions Berlioz wrote while living in Paris celebrate this union of text and music, like La Symphonie fantastique with its programmatic textual supplement, and his extensive literature-inspired pieces. Yet, despite the degree to which Paris catered to some of Berlioz’s most ardent aesthetic desires, it also prompted dreams to alternate, imagined cityscapes as his ambivalence to this cultural mecca grew. He sought to participate in Paris’s musical life, as his letter to Hugo and his adventures at the Opéra suggest, but he was also increasingly unhappy there.
A most interesting example that links correspondence between music, story and nostalgic self-reflection to the contradictions Paris presented Berlioz is the case of his opera Benvenuto Cellini, which premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1838. A nineteenth-century revival of a figure of the Italian renaissance, the opera is based on the autobiography of the famed Italian renaissance sculptor and goldsmith. The work thus highlights a figure like Berlioz. In 1837, he also published a short story about Cellini, The First Opera: Tale of the Past, which became the first night of Evenings with the Orchestra, while Euphonia, or the Musical City: Tale of the Future would be its last. Alas, the opening of Benvenuto Cellini was a ‘sensational failure’.Footnote 54 Everyone performing it disrespected the composer, according to Berlioz, and at the premiere, the overture was successful but the audience ‘booed the rest’. The vitality of creative possibilities he experienced when he first moved to Paris thus transformed to increasing disdain of the Parisian musical establishment and Parisians’ taste in music. In an 1839 letter to Robert Schumann, Berlioz explains that Paris is a ‘mixed world’, populated by ‘an enormous number of cretins and a prodigious number of scoundrels’.Footnote 55 Yet in another letter to his sister Nanci from 1846, he reveals that ‘it would be impossible for me to live anywhere but Paris’.Footnote 56 In this light, the utopian Euphonia nonetheless remains conceptually linked to the very material realities that Berlioz experienced in Paris. In Euphonia, Berlioz moulds a world of musical performance and taste that suit his nostalgic imagination, rooted in an array of potentialities, in all the possible scenarios that could have happened but never materialized in Paris. Euphonia is, therefore, also a projection of the desires that Berlioz would have loved to have fulfilled in the French capital and is a result of both his passion and disdain for this city.
To complicate these emotional and artistic constraints, Berlioz could also not afford to live in Paris without finding work outside of composing and conducting. Music criticism offered a regular income. Unfortunately, the union of words and music he celebrates in Gluck and his own compositions was not as pleasant for Berlioz when it came to writing criticism. He bemoans the ‘misfortune to be an artist and a critic at the same time’.Footnote 57 Yet criticism offered one advantage apart from money: it allowed Berlioz to occasionally entertain the ‘rushes of my heart towards the grand, the true, the beautiful’.Footnote 58 Indeed, Berlioz’s ‘most poetic moments are to be found in his “admirative criticism” of heroes, particularly Beethoven and Gluck’, according to Katharine Ellis.Footnote 59 Unlike a typical review of a new opera or ballet, this form of critical analysis, the ‘admirative criticism’, as Berlioz dubbed it, blends discussion of the poetic and emotional elements of music with an analysis of its technical challenges.Footnote 60 In its own way, Euphonia is representative of this form of writing. There, Berlioz orchestrates a hybrid text that intersperses technical aspects of music making within an emotional drama linked to his autobiographical memory and the idealized conception of music he saw in the figure of Gluck. Given the relatively little-known status of this tale, I propose a close reading of Euphonia that demonstrates how nostalgic retrospection with an eye to a future ideal shaped Berlioz’s ingenious novella and new city.
Euphonia, The Futuristic City: Home to a Musical Community
Euphonia, or the Musical City: Tale of the Future first appeared in eight instalments in the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris between 18 February 1844 and 28 July 1844. As mentioned earlier, Berlioz republished Euphonia, with slight moderations, in his 1852 Evenings with the Orchestra. One such moderation is the framing of the story within the larger volume which has the X**** orchestral musicians tell each other stories during performances and only half-heartedly play their parts while uninteresting, ‘mediocre’ operas occur onstage.Footnote 61 This polyvocal framework adds another level of intertextuality to the novella as well as lending it a certain realism, a story told in a specific context the 1844 version lacked. Hence, the final version opens with the following: ‘They are playing etc., etc., etc.’, without any specific indication of that evening’s operatic offering.Footnote 62
At the start of the overture, Corsino the concertmaster begins his tale: ‘It is a tale of the future. The scene will take place in 2344’. The earlier run of Euphonia included none of this. However, the 1844 version included a footnote: ‘This tale, written in old language, may only be understood by … the erudite few who have studied the French language of the nineteenth century; it’s a caprice of the editor’.Footnote 63 This insistence on an imaginary future publication date is a first sign of the playful elements of the text. Writing for a nineteenth-century public about a future readership unable to understand nineteenth-century French is at once comical and critical. Berlioz’s note also implants a kind of futuristic nostalgia into the textual fabric of his tale. By playing with obsolescence, Berlioz uses language as a relic from the past. The pastness of this ‘old language’ will make of the text a curious object of inquiry for a handful of readers who might understand it. With Euphonia set in the future, it is only fitting that Berlioz would wonder what French would be like in 2344, even as he reimagines the French of his own time.
The original names, different from those of 1852, indicate that Berlioz had himself and his past in mind when writing for the Revue et Gazette. For example, Rotceh, who is a composer and prefect of wind instruments in Euphonia, is Hector backwards. Ellimac, when rearranged, spells Camille, a reference to Camille Moke, the pianist whom Berlioz intended to marry. When Moke instead planned to marry the heir to the Pleyel piano company, Berlioz crafted, but ultimately failed to accomplish a complex revenge that involved a triple murder and a suicide. However, in Euphonia, revenge does occur, for in Berlioz’s artistic mind, retribution is perhaps best carried out in textual or musical forms. Berlioz provides another footnote in the 1844 publication indicating that these textual effects represent ‘modern language’, as opposed to the ‘old language’ in which the tale is written.Footnote 64 Such playfulness signals the topsy-turvy nature of Euphonia as both city and text. Adding to this, Berlioz closes this instalment of the 1844 story by directly addressing the reader in ‘modern’ French. He writes, ‘Ô sdnahcram! ô segavuas! ut en sariorc sap, siam ej eruj rap Gluck te Beethoven, euq alec tse iarv!’, the reversal of ‘Ô marchands! Ô sauvages! Tu ne croiras pas, mais je jure par Gluck et Beethoven, que cela est vrai!’ (‘Oh hucksters! Oh savages! You will not believe, but I swear by Gluck and Beethoven, that this is true!’). Amid such frolicsome language play, Berlioz reminds readers of his serious reverence for the composers whose names he does not reverse; or perhaps Berlioz also parodies his own veneration for such figures, as many aspects of this comical novella suggest.
Only Xilef, a young composer and prefect of voices and stringed instruments in Euphonia, appears so named in both versions of the story. When rearranged, his name spells Felix, or Latin for happy – alas, his fate will not match his name. More judicious than Xilef is Shetland, who replaces Rotceh in 1852; his name when rearranged happens to spell Stendhal, whom Berlioz met in Rome in 1831. He also met Felix Mendelssohn there in that year. If Xilef and Shetland are potential doubles for these notable artists, they are also stand-ins for Berlioz, representing his emotional maturity and artistic opinions at varying states of his life. They thus remind us of the nostalgic self-reflection that motivates the Euphonian project. To close out the cast of characters of the 1852 Euphonia, there is the Danish soprano Mina, her mother Mrs. Happer, and Fanny the chambermaid. For the analysis of Euphonia that follows, I refer to the 1852 version.
Berlioz takes his five characters to multiple cities in Europe, including Palermo, Paris, and the imaginary Euphonia, but also to New York, which Xilef reaches via technologically inventive means. The novella thus takes on certain aspects of retrofuturism. And with an alternative temporal framework as a driving force, the text itself is as ingenious. Throughout, Berlioz intermingles polyphonic narrative with unconventional spatio-temporal implications and autobiographical links to his own experience, emphasizing the hybrid nature of his creative process. The story is at once comical, melodramatically romantic, educative, and violent. These features enhance its unexpected nature. Yet below its chaotic surface, Berlioz creates a musico-literary space where he can cultivate his artistically motivated desires, the same ‘instinctive passion’ he felt while discovering Gluck as a child.Footnote 65 Euphonia is thus a city built upon nostalgia: for the author’s past, for a bygone era of musical composition and for a time and place that, outside of our imaginations, might never have existed and never will. And at the same time, the autobiographical relevance of Berlioz’s discovery of Gluck is a constitutive element of the fantasy city of Euphonia. In this manner, Euphonia is an imagined urban space in which Berlioz fantasizes about a community of musicians and audiences alike that understand and wish to cultivate a passion for perfectly performed music. This music, moreover, offers ‘truth of expression’ rather than just entertainment.Footnote 66 Consequently, Euphonia opposes Berlioz’s Paris, of which Berlioz’s novella offers a ‘scathing criticism’.Footnote 67 Thus, Euphonia is a projection of Berlioz’s urban desires, a city based on his most salient autobiographical memories, bitter and sweet, elaborated through writing and storytelling.
A Utopian Story Built from Nostalgia Desire
Inge Van Rij suggests that Euphonia ‘functions as a diversion from music Berlioz’, as well as his friends in the X**** orchestra, ‘considered trivial’.Footnote 68 Yet Van Rij also insists on the serious doctrinal matter that motivates the narrative, the edification of ‘the musical masterwork’, notably Gluck’s operatic œuvre.Footnote 69 Jöel-Marie Fauquet reminds us that in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the Utopians ‘cultivate music, the only art form mentioned numerous times in this foundational text’.Footnote 70 Surely Berlioz, who read voraciously, was aware of More’s work.
He was likely influenced by other utopian fictions of his era, such as Félix Bodin’s Novel of the Future (1834) and Étienne Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria (1840) where ‘music is made by and for everyone’.Footnote 71 According to Esteban Buch, Charles Duveyrier’s The New City (1832), which centres a theoretical utopian society around music and Saint-Simonian philosophy, likely served as another influence, particularly for the organ in the middle of Euphonia that regulates daily life.Footnote 72 Indeed, Berlioz wrote to Duveyrier in 1831 stating that he was ‘convinced today that Saint-Simon’s is the only true and complete plan’.Footnote 73 If, according to Buch, technological fiction surged only in the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘utopic literature prophesizing future happiness founded on the alliance of socialism and technology was circulating in Paris by the 1840s’.Footnote 74 But Euphonia also ‘confirms an only growing tendency’ in utopian texts whereby technology serves as a means ‘to justify the project it makes possible until the irreversible moment when technology destroys the structure it animates’.Footnote 75
Again, intertextuality is a pivotal aspect of Berlioz’s utopian project, as it is a pivotal facet of his entire textual, but also musical corpus. And along with this intertextuality comes the hybridity that is so common among Berlioz’s artistic creations like La Damnation de Faust or the Memoirs. Fauquet affirms that Euphonia ‘is the proof of’ this hybridity, for ‘the story’s narrative structure borrows from diverse literary genres’ like bourgeois theatre, the epistolary novel and autobiography.Footnote 76 Béatrice Didier likens Euphonia to a ‘futuristic firework’ that ‘reunites multiple [narrative] techniques’.Footnote 77 Unsurprisingly, Euphonia and the greater Evenings with the Orchestra share thematic and organizational characteristics with a variety of literary traditions. Katherine Kolb maintains that ‘with a range of allusion and vividness of detail’, these tales evoke Honoré de Balzac.Footnote 78 Indeed, the eponymous mad composer in Balzac’s Gambara (1837) utilizes technological wizardry to achieve an idealized form of music. Bruno Messina links Evenings to sources as various as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s collection of tales, notably The Golden Pot (1814), and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349–53). If The Thousand and One Nights narrative structure inspired Evenings with the Orchestra, Messina specifically correlates King Shahryar’s murderous impulse to the gory revenge plot devised by Xilef.Footnote 79 In this context, I liken the figure of Scheherazade, who narrates a new story every night for one thousand and one nights, to the X**** musicians, including Corsino who shares Euphonia with his fellow musicians. Further still, Corsino represents another stand-in for Berlioz who, as an author, aimed to entertain his readers with at times melodramatic self-examination and storytelling. Yet he also wanted to edify us with artistic philosophy.
The figure of the artist-educator, of the musician who composes but also develops a moral code based on certain musical standards is central to Berlioz’s utopian realm and his wider autobiographical project. As he shares insights into the musical world of the past, present and future, he creates a bond between the reader and a greater musical collective. This same process occurs within the city of Euphonia. Buch asserts that ‘the correspondence between the passions of the soul and their sonic translation is a guarantor of the moral link between individuals and the community’, a notion first explored by Thomas More.Footnote 80 Yet Fauquet counters this notion by suggesting that ‘the collective fate’ of the Euphonians is actually ‘threatened by the individual drama’.Footnote 81 Violent events radically shift the Euphonian paradise at the tale’s end when Xilef exacts his revenge on the soprano Mina, resulting in, among other things, her death and a silencing of Euphonia’s music.
Yet even to achieve their musical excellence before its aggressive interruption, Euphonians are subject to such strict control that even their motions – and emotions – are limited as they execute their musical duties. This dual nature of Berlioz’s city is another example of its hybridity. On one hand, Euphonians ‘seem to live in a nostalgic, neoclassical harmony of ancient Athens of Sparta’.Footnote 82 On the other, ‘individual bodies are sacrificed to the body of Euphonia itself, which is dedicated to transmitting the masterwork’ thanks to a technological manifestation of the composer-conductor’s precise conception of the music.Footnote 83 Nostalgic for a particular rendition of musical works that he wants to replicate, Berlioz fashions an ideal city in which music sounds as he thinks is optimal. In Euphonia, those perfect performances can be regained again. And While Berlioz’s potential ambivalence towards technology arises, his attitude towards the artist-educator’s role in ensuring musical values, those sonic ‘passions of the souls’, leaves no doubt: the creator, and by extension the conductor, possesses absolute power in enforcing what Jacques Barzun calls ‘the morality of musicianship’. Barzun thus claims that Berlioz’s ‘insistence on putting his Musical City under Spartan rule grows out of his experience of bad musicians and their perversions of masterpieces’.Footnote 84
Hence, Berlioz’s utopic city of Euphonia results from a nostalgic desire to conserve the music he loves, even if by drastic means. It also serves as an allegorical retaliation against the Parisian musical industry. The ‘nostalgia-utopia tandem’ that inspired Euphonia and the Memoirs therefore morphs into a form of revenge-induced dystopian nightmare. Again, such a contradiction underscores the hybrid nature of Berlioz’s text and his creative ingenuity. And the romantic (as in amorous) storyline between Shetland, Xilef and Mina mirrors this self-protection-revenge parallel, yet it does so on an even more personal level as it directly correlates to a dramatic period of Berlioz’s life, namely his failed relationship with Camille Moke in the early 1830s. Berlioz reminds us, then, that the utopian ideal naturally exposes its dystopic contrary, that the ideal reveals the hellish, that beauty uncovers the hideous, these dualities that propelled the romantic (as in stylistic and philosophical) movement. Still, if Euphonia is indeed a ‘parody of [More’s] Utopia’, as Fauquet dubs it, it might also be a parody of Berlioz’s autobiographical self-importance and the dangers of totalitarian artistic philosophies.Footnote 85 At the same time, the text reads as a genuine philosophical exploration of musical possibility, of music-centred virtual realities. Berlioz’s versatility is boundless.
A Tale of the Future and Monument to the Past
Nineteenth-century nostalgia often arose from the alienating effect of industrialization, which created a sharp contrast between nature and the urban. It is fitting, then, that Euphonia starts with a letter from Xilef to Shetland, dated 7 June 2344, in which the former writes of swimming in Mount Etna as he sang a song he composed based on ‘a poem in old French by Lamartine’, the archetypal mal-du-siècle French romantic poet.Footnote 86 If nature and memory open the story, Berlioz quickly counters them with Xilef’s characterization of twenty-fourth-century Italy as a musical dystopia where industrialization has overshadowed a rich artistic tradition. This future Italy recalls Berlioz’s observations there in the 1830s; it is also an allegory for France in Berlioz’s time, where a certain ‘industrialism of art’ made musical creation all the more challenging for the author.Footnote 87 According to Jacques Barzun, Berlioz was concerned with the way ‘music is cheapened’ by ‘being slackly lavished on the inattentive’ bourgeois operagoer who cares little for what happens on the stage (or in the pit).Footnote 88 And Berlioz’s insistence on the singular integrity of art, of art for its own sake, naturally extends to his retrospective impulse to highlight the singularity of the artist himself.
Still, the mechanical marvels of Euphonia would not exist without industry, and Euphonians would not excel at their art without the rigorous industrial standards imposed on them. Xilef continues as he bemoans the rowdy audiences in Italian theatres. Again, irony abounds, for Evenings with the Orchestra only functions when the orchestra musicians tell stories out loud during performances. And Berlioz certainly recalls his student days when he and his friends would disrupt theatrical events. But he, and his invented pit orchestra, only disrupt when music and performances they dislike occur.
The text continues with an interruption as Xilef complains of no news from Mina. Like Xilef, Berlioz had anxiously awaited news from Moke. Xilef then laments Mina’s preference for ‘ornamented singing’ over ‘grand surges of the soul’, echoing Berlioz’s frequent criticism of Parisians’ love for virtuosic vocal technique and a general misunderstanding of groundbreaking music. Xilef then lambastes Italian orchestras, with their multiple bass drums, overly large brass sections and reduced string and woodwind sections. He closes the letter in near convulsions: ‘Mina!. Mina!. Paris! …’.Footnote 89 Xilef explains in his next letter that ‘the Sicilian Academy’ has requested ‘information on the organization of our musical city’ and asks Shetland to send ‘a copy of our city charter’.Footnote 90 Here Berlioz projects the future of Euphonia itself, indicating the later insertion of the ‘Description of Euphonia’ within an existing narrative structure. A scene of dialogue in Paris follows: Mina laments her love life (as active as Xilef fears) and devises a plan to sing at the Gluck festival in Euphonia under the guise of Nadira, with her mother acting as her aunt. Mina then plays passages from Shetland’s first symphony and reveals her growing feelings for him, ‘different from other men … due to his genius, his character … the mystery of his life’.Footnote 91
A third letter, this time from Shetland to Xilef, indicates that Xilef has missed the Gluck festival. Shetland describes how a woman unexpectedly arrived in Euphonia via an ‘elegant balloon’, from which ‘she sang the theme from my first symphony’.Footnote 92 This theme is an implicit reference to existing music, the Symphonie fantastique’s idée fixe. Footnote 93 Shetland then comments on the jealousy and suffering Nadira (Mina in disguise) would cause in a man who loves her, much like Berlioz’s jeune artiste in the programme he wrote for the Symphonie fantastique. During the festival, Shetland chooses Nadira ‘to crown the statue of Gluck’, declaring that ‘art should now give to beauty a part of its glory’.Footnote 94 Nadira professes, ‘now I understand, I hear, I live’. She throws her pearls to the ground and sings an aria from Alceste. Stupefied, the Euphonians at first resist applause but then let out ‘a cry of ten thousand souls … in a diminished seventh chord followed by a pompous cadence in C major’. The letter ends with Shetland declaring his love for Nadira. A brief third-person narrative then announces that Mina’s mother has sent Xilef a letter, explaining that Mina has renounced him and will travel to America. Xilef gives the Sicilian academicians the materials Shetland sent as thoughts of vengeance overcome him. The ‘Description of Euphonia’ follows.
Set apart from the novella’s actual plot and presented to the reader without comment from characters, the ‘Description of Utopia’ becomes somewhat of an island within a larger narrative frame. Here, Berlioz lays out the city in detail, and the description becomes Euphonia’s formal utopia. The narrative around it simultaneously supports the city’s philosophical organization and operation but also counters it as dystopian elements overtake the novella. Berlioz’s description thus begins: ‘Euphonia is a small city … situated on the slope in Harz’, a highland region in northern Germany that recalls the natural setting of his youth.Footnote 95 Harz is also the setting for Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht in part one of Faust (1808), which Berlioz symphonized to horrific effects in the fifth movement ‘Dream of a Night of the Sabbath’ of the Symphonie fantastique. Far more dramatic than the ‘plain’ in which La Côte-Saint-André is situated, the mountainous Harz is nevertheless evocative of the environs of Berlioz’s idyllic hometown.Footnote 96 Harz thus becomes an ironic reminder of the contrast between his current situation and his childhood while also serving as his felt home, an affective place of musical perfection in the German mountains, far from Paris.
Berlioz continues, ‘the practice of this art’ – of music – ‘is the unique purpose of [Euphonia’s] residents’ work’. Berlioz’s fantasy of expertly controlled and performed music takes shape as he notes that ‘Euphonia is governed militarily and subject to a despotic regime. This way, a perfect order reigns in studies’, a reminder of Berlioz’s insistence on educating the public, and ‘marvellous effects are produced’.Footnote 97 The narrator explains that ‘a gigantic organ placed at the top of a tower’ alerts Euphonians to meal and rehearsal times.Footnote 98 This organ is inspired by Duveyrier’s The New City, as mentioned earlier, and one that Adolphe Sax, who patented the saxophone in 1846, imagined five hundred years prior to its appearance in Euphonia.
Furthermore, Berlioz’s description indicates the value of memory in a musical society: ‘Euphonia has become the marvellous conservatory of monumental music’, a reminder of Berlioz’s memorialization of the past.Footnote 99 During rehearsals of new music, ‘the great ensemble is subjected to the criticism of the composer, who listens from the top of the amphitheatre’.Footnote 100 The composer is an ‘absolute master of this immense, intelligent instrument’. Berlioz iterates the same notion in his Memoirs as he imagines himself ‘absolute master’ of an institution like the Opéra, ‘a vast musical instrument’.Footnote 101 To achieve such mastery over Euphonians, ‘a tuning fork [is] fixed to every stand’.Footnote 102 Moreover, ‘an ingenious mechanism discovered five or six hundred years ago’ follows ‘the movements of the conductor’, indicating ‘before the eyes of every player … times and bars’ but also ‘the diverse degrees of forte and piano’. This utopic mechanical device certainly seems futuristic, especially for 1844 when the idea was planted into the text. But in fact, Berlioz commissioned ‘an electric metronome’ for a concert in 1855.Footnote 103 He writes, ‘this discovery … as I already indicated in my novella Euphonia … is of the highest importance for composers’.Footnote 104 Furthermore, Berlioz’s insistence on technical proficiency recalls a Saint-Simonian concept of an ‘industrial elite’ who organized workers with optimal efficiency in mind.Footnote 105 Euphonia thus advances: ‘To celebrate the decennial Gluck festival’, nearly a thousand women are heard to determine who might best sing Alceste. The ‘privileges accorded to certain artists’ are prohibited; the egos that have tarnished musical culture in Paris have no place in Berlioz’s imagined future city.Footnote 106
The centrality of the Gluck festival in Euphonian life underscores the notion that at music festivals, ‘affective ties are created through music, heritage, and nostalgia and understood by attendees through performance’.Footnote 107 As we have seen, Berlioz’s interest in a highly regimented musical society also links to his doctrinal philosophy linking passion-inducing music to morality. Thus, while he nostalgically celebrates musical heritage, he also focuses on control, and particularly control exercised by the composer. For Van Rij, if ‘Gluck’s operas will be the center of civilised society’, this is because he ‘symbolized for [Berlioz] an operatic model that privileged the authority of the composer’.Footnote 108 ‘The Description of Euphonia’ becomes a model for such a society and its technologically advanced amphitheatre becomes a model space in which to perform and hear. Berlioz had already envisioned such a space in an 1841 publication on Beethoven, suggesting he ‘would build a sonic temple at the foot of Mount Ida’.Footnote 109 He also mentions a ‘lyric pantheon, exclusively devoted to presenting monumental masterpieces’ during the thirteenth evening of Evenings with the Orchestra.Footnote 110 Unsurprisingly, this evening celebrates another composer-idol, Gaspare Spontini (1744–1851), and draws from a text Berlioz already published. Its presence in the larger volume is yet another indicator of the intertextual nostalgic memorialization that drives Berlioz’s creative world and urge to control it. Given the import of such concepts, Berlioz magnifies his musical city by distinguishing it from the rest of the novella’s plot.
At this point in Euphonia, Xilef has gone off to the western hemisphere by various highspeed vehicular means. Unable to find Mina, he returns to Euphonia, where he meets Shetland and Nadira. Suspicious of the latter, Xilef comes to understand what has happened. He devises a plan to accomplish revenge using two new machines: a large, versatile instrument known as a piano-orchestra and a steel pavilion, to which he has the inventor attach a secret ‘energetic mechanism’.Footnote 111 On the day of a party for Nadira, Shetland plays the piano-orchestra while she and her friends dance in the pavilion. When Xilef engages the hidden mechanism, the pavilion shrinks as Shetland’s music continues. Xilef yells to the panicked soprano: ‘Mina, what’s the matter, beautiful dear? … Is your steel corset too tight?’.Footnote 112 She and her company expire as the ‘hideous sound’ of their mangling bodies is heard, as per Berlioz’s grisly description. When Shetland notices, he goes mad and soon dies. Xilef, contented, exclaims in English, ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’, the same Shakespearean line Berlioz uses towards the end of his Memoirs.Footnote 113 Xilef then sniffs cyanogen and falls dead. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, Euphonia goes into mourning. At the two composers’ funeral, ‘public consternation was such that songs and even funerial sounds were forbidden’. In this textual fantasy, a cruellest violence silences the musical city.
Euphonia ends abruptly. Corsino puts away his manuscript and leaves the orchestra pit while the musicians make plans to attend a banquet to honour Berlioz before he returns to Paris. For Berlioz had been in the pit with them all along, telling stories and ignoring various operatic banalities. And as the tale closes, its geographical setting in Harz – that legendary space where witches and demons perform their own yearly festival of satanic memorialization on Walpurgisnacht – takes on new meaning. For, as Buch explains, ‘Berlioz’s utopia, so close to a dystopia for today’s reader, is situated on the site of ritualistic evil par excellence’; Van Rij furthers this dystopian commentary by suggesting that ‘creating the music of the future can be a dangerous enterprise if the potential risks of technology are not negotiated with utmost care’.Footnote 114 The ‘vast music-conservatory’ of Euphonia turns silent and thus what had started as a nostalgic-utopian projection turns into a dystopic future. That this should happen in a location like the Harz mountains makes of Euphonia a text much more concerned with Berlioz’s relationship to German romanticism than viewing the text as an imaginary utopia initially implies. The future in Euphonia is nothing but a mirror of the past and an alternative world to what could have happened, all presented under a patina of irony.
Berlioz’s Homecoming
Certain unsettling elements of Berlioz’s reality in Paris seep into the veneer of his affective imaginary home in Euphonia. The desires he sought to fulfil in the French musical establishment necessarily existed alongside fears of failure in his artistic work and personal life, which, as we have seen, are inseparable. Likewise, in Euphonia, the retrospective reproduction of past music and a life that might have existed cannot thrive without counterparts and contradictions, either in an Italy of 2344, in paradoxical artists within the city limits or in the author’s real lived experience. As Berlioz projects his autobiographical nostalgia onto Euphonia, he also projects a version of his autobiographical truth onto this virtual reality. Hence, this nostalgic locus of expressive potential always already implied the presence of disruptive, resistant forces. After all, how could romanticism have flourished without such dualities? How could nostalgic reminiscence operate without disquieting phenomena of the present? And if Berlioz’s desires come from a place of unbridled possibilities, when it comes to actual artistic production, as Euphonia suggests, he is not so naïve as to think that life or art must come with a happy ending. It is possible, too, that the ruptures the novella finally presents are yet another playful element of Berlioz’s creative imagination.
As an author (and composer) Berlioz managed to find narrative harmony among these incongruities. Despite the novella’s frightful conclusion, Euphonia remains an urban utopia of nostalgic desire and artistic creation set within alternate spatio-temporalities, and surely the Euphonians eventually return to their celebrations of Gluck, even if the Berlioz-like figures of Xilef and Shetland are no longer present.
Back in his real home, Paris, Berlioz still had work to do, despite his struggles there and a strong desire to exist and, indeed, prosper elsewhere. Some of that work paralleled the artistic practices and questions raised in Euphonia. Just four days after the final instalment of the 1844 serialized version of the novella appeared in print, Berlioz gathered over a thousand musicians to perform works by Gluck and Beethoven, among others, at a festival at the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris. A year prior, he published his Treatise on Instrumentation, an exploration of music’s fullest potential via effective instrumental writing and combinations. In this work, the orchestra operates as a machine carefully controlled by the composer and then conductor; as such, its mechanical implications suggest those of the technologically advanced music systems in place in Euphonia. Moreover, the Treatise ‘blossomed forth from the emotional relationships the composer maintained with the works of those who first revealed to him the power of music’.Footnote 115 I suggest the same for Euphonia and the 1844 festival, but also nearly all of Berlioz’s artistic output, which takes shape through these same impulses. Despite considerable hurdles in preparing the mass of performers for the festival, Berlioz boasts that ‘my Musical Exposition took place, not only without accident, but with brilliant success and approbation of the immense audience’.Footnote 116
In 1859 and 1861, Berlioz oversaw, respectively, Parisian productions of Gluck’s Orphée at the Théâtre Lyrique and Alceste at the Opéra. Both productions were successful, especially Gluck’s rendering of the orphic myth. It is of course noteworthy that Berlioz enjoyed these triumphs when conducting music he did not write, even if he had reworked certain elements of the Gluck for a variety of reasons. Yet in tampering, even if slightly, with Gluck’s masterworks, had Berlioz not dismissed the creator’s original, an act he would typically vilify in others? Or, in this instance, did he attempt ‘to perfect a work that he already considered exemplary’?Footnote 117 Was this therefore another form of reverence for Gluck? To that end, might any number of Berlioz’s own compositions and stories be reworkings of other artists’ originals in one way or another? Les Troyens would not exist without Virgil’s original work, itself a reformulation of Homer; the opera would also not exist without the influence of Gluck’s music. ‘Ought we in this case’ Fauquet speculates ‘take such reinvention as evidence that Berlioz, the quintessential romantic, wished now to adopt a more classical posture’?Footnote 118
I suggest that Berlioz was motivated at once by past values and forward-thinking creativity, by nostalgia and ingenuity. The result is a body of work that is itself a multilayered utopia upheld by hybrid forms of autobiographical self-reflection and memory. In many cases, the atmosphere of the cities in which he lived and worked either emboldened or hindered the evolution of such a creative practice. A city like Paris in the nineteenth century displayed signs of the past while it constantly rebuilt itself. Surely the dualistic nature of the modern city shaped Berlioz’s own version of modernism, one where literature and music, the past, present and future, real and imagined experiences coincide. But if Paris, a particular musical institution or even a cherished artistic figure did not provide what Berlioz desired, he invented it himself. His nostalgia for his own artistic tastes and opinions thus manifests his nostalgic creativity. It is an imaginative faculty that proliferates through memorative ‘palimpsest and reference’, ever building on his and others’ artistic experiences.Footnote 119
In this way, Berlioz’s attitude towards nostalgia, but also time and space, is that ‘of a musician doubled by a writer who, since childhood, built with words and sounds an imaginary country, a musical and verbal elsewhere, a sort of intimate Euphonia where disparate elements combine and complete each other’.Footnote 120 Again, the utopia-nostalgia tandem comes to mind, as does a tandem that joins music, text and the self. For this, Berlioz’s artistic world enjoys such intellectual breadth, combined with extremes in temperament, form and volume, as they relate either to sound or words. Just as he had to escape into worlds of literature and music to understand himself, he at times needed to imagine and then escape to completely new places, such as the city of Euphonia, where the new and old coexist, and where Berlioz was the absolute master.
Dane Stalcup is a professor of French at Wagner College in New York City. His work examines the intersections of music and literature in nineteenth-century Europe, with an emphasis on France. Dane regularly focuses on the autobiographical writing and music of the French romantic composer Hector Berlioz. His publications have appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and The Routledge Handbook of French History, among others. Current work includes an analysis of the “Pandemonium” from Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust. Another project links short stories by Berlioz and Honoré de Balzac. Dane completed his PhD in French literature at New York University. He is also a violinist in New York’s Queer Urban Orchestra.
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