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Miniatures of a Monumentalist: Berlioz's Romances, 1842–1850*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2013
Abstract
This article reassesses Berlioz's complex relationship to the French romance. Berlioz is often regarded as a musical revolutionary who made his mark writing massive, path-breaking symphonies – a far cry from the popular songs that became a staple of the bourgeois woman's salon. Yet he wrote romances throughout his life. How are we to understand these songs in the context of his overall output? What did the genre mean to him? How do his romances relate to the larger works on which his reputation rests? I explore these questions in relation to the romances he composed or revised between 1842 and 1850, a period often regarded as a fallow one for Berlioz but one that nonetheless saw a surge of songwriting activity. Drawing upon recent theories about the autobiographical construction of Berlioz's music, and considering when these songs were written or revised, to whom they were dedicated, what images were associated with them and how their texts relate to the events of Berlioz's biography, I argue that their conventionality belies a deeply personal resonance and a musical ingenuity uncommon to the romance genre. As a whole, these songs show Berlioz returning to an intimate and direct style during an especially introspective and nostalgic period of his life. Even more, they suggest that his urge toward self-reflection was not confined to the programmatic and the large-scale, and that his miniatures and monuments have more in common than one might think.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013
Footnotes
*
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Los Angeles, in 2006. Research on this project was supported by a Faculty Research Fellowship from the Oregon Humanities Center. I am grateful to Francesca Brittan, the late Anne Dhu McLucas, and the two anonymous readers for providing comments on an earlier draft.
References
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