The Role of the State

In the final pages of a recent monograph devoted to Berlioz, Julian Rushton includes the following words:

Whereas Rushton’s summing-up goes on to conclude that “Berlioz’s last works elevate nostalgia to the highest artistic level, and break out of nineteenth- century moulds by recovering the past,” the following essay concerns Berlioz’s earlier responses to past models. Dahlhaus’s “dictum” occurred in a discussion about that century’s changed ways of regarding the past; about the “profound change in the ways in which past music was received,” allied to a supposed “crisis” in the craft of composition teaching itself—a crisis which explains Schubert’s late course of counterpoint teaching in 1828 with Sechter, for instance. The following reflections will speculate upon Berlioz’s experience of being taught, but will not have occasion to conclude that this involved a “crisis.”

Recent art historians like Michael Marrinan and Beth S. Wright have focused on the 1820s and 1830s in France precisely in order to delve into the substance of turbulent conflict in ways of regarding and representing the past. For painting, this process was closely bound up with official patronage, with genre, and with the politics of the day. Berlioz’s Paris during these decades was sundered by profound artistic rifts in assumptions about genre, historical perspective, and subject-ma est—the State-sponsored Salons under Louis-Philippe were now held each year, for example, instead of biennially. And thanks in part to the genius of Walter Scott, a very rapid experiential assimilation (by the public) of a revolutionary approach to history became possible. Put simply, a new, politically liberal view of History was articulated through the role and depiction of le peuple, as well as through the concomitant breaking down of traditional generic disciplinestter; and these intense debates and their associated actions were avidly attended by public inter