“Berlioz ne fut jamais, à proprement parler, un musicien de théâtre” – “Berlioz was never, properly speaking, a musician of the theatre.” This seems a strange judgment on a composer whose work is from beginning to end of intensely dramatic character, and who for most of his life was strongly interested in and closely connected with the musical stage. It is especially odd if one considers its source. Debussy when he made this remark (1893) was beginning work on his only complete opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. Like Berlioz he considered and even began composition on other operatic projects. And Debussy's operatic masterpiece, though it has had better luck staying in the repertory than Berlioz's Les Troyens, has always been more admired by devotees than loved by the general public, something true of Berlioz's great work as well. Debussy and Berlioz are surely greater composers than Massenet and Meyerbeer; but the latter were more successful stage composers in their own day.

Debussy is not alone in his opinion. Until quite recently critics tended toward the view, perhaps still current among music lovers in general, that Berlioz was more successful as dramatist in his symphonies than in his stage works. Why should this be so – the view, that is – when the reality, if the reader will accept my opinion as a definition of that undoubtedly slippery concept, is quite different? It began during the composer's lifetime.

Like his symphonies, Berlioz's concert overtures raise lingering questions regarding the effect of “story” or program upon pure musical coherence. Their relative brevity – crucial to their popularity both during and after the composer's lifetime – allows observation of how he handled such matters as organization and orchestration in the approximately twenty-five-year period between the composition of the first and last works included in this category.

The genre of the concert overture excludes those composed as operatic preludes. For this reason there is no discussion here of the Grande Ouverture de Benvenuto Cellini, composed in February 1838 and published in full score in 1839, long before the rest of the opera, or of the overture to Béatrice et Bénédict. Les Troyens is striking for – among other things – its opening in medias res, with no separate overture. However, when external considerations caused Les Troyens to be divided in half, Berlioz felt the necessity of explicating the action of La Prise de Troie (the acts excised at the time of the performance) by opening Les Troyens à Carthage with a Prologue, which he composed in June 1863. This consists of a Lamento, a Légende (in which a rapsode, or epic narrator, gives a synopsis of La Prise de Troie), and the Marche troyenne “in the triumphal mode” accompanied by a Choeur de rapsodes.

In a recent novel by the popular French journalist Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, Un Héros de passage, a prototypically inexperienced and ambitious young man arrives from the provinces in the capital – the year is 1845 – there to seek fame and fortune. In Paris he makes the acquaintance of a darkly beautiful woman called “Queen Pomaré.” This is not the historical Tahitian Queen whose fifty-year reign over the Polynesian island, from 1827 to 1877, encompassed its establishment as a French protectorate in 1843; it is rather the then fashionable cancan dancer, Élise Sergent, whose exotic and richly bejeweled appearance earned her that piquant and much bandied-about royal appellation.

What has this to do with Berlioz? It happens that in a musical boutade for a friend's album the composer once portrayed himself as chapelmaster to “Queen Pomaré” and composed “in Tahitian words and music” what he called a “morning greeting” to Her Gracious Majesty. I would not be surprised if there were a relationship between this Salut matinal – evidence, like so much else in his oeuvre, of our man's delight in voyages both real and imagined – and the “other” Queen Pomaré, who was the licentious star of the Bal Mabille in the mid-eighteen-forties, when the undated album-leaf may well have been set down. The sobriquet pomaré, like others applied to women of doubtful virtue, was widely known to all who made and attended to art and literature at the time.

Composers do not always know what is best for their music; they may hold copyright in the dots, but not, fortunately, a monopoly on their interpretation. It is naive to presume that any recording involving the composer will automatically set a qualitative benchmark: apart from anything else, performance – especially early recorded performance – does not spring fully formed like Athene from the head of Zeus, but is always subject to the practical vagaries and contingencies of players' availability, schedules, temperament, (lack of) rehearsal time and the technical limitations of the young recording medium. Yet it is too easy to overplay the scepticism. All intelligent performers know the importance of internalising the music, and appreciate that satisfying sense of the music re-emerging from deep within them, rather than feeling their hands and body functioning as mere thoroughfares between brain and instrument. And from the evidence of many early recordings of Ravel, for the best musicians working with and around the composer – unlike us – the sheer cultural currency and ‘presence’ of the music seems largely to have evaporated the need to deploy any self-conscious ‘performance practice’, and led to a directness in that process of internalisation which we have little hope of recapturing, but from which we still have much to learn.

Berlioz's romances and mélodies – in particular Les Nuits d'été – occupy a key position in the historiography of French song. Berlioz, the “renovator” of so much French music, has been seen as the composer whose various accomplishments include the transformation of the apparently insipid romance into a serious form on the model of the German Lied. His admiration for Schubert's songs, expressed directly in his reviews and indirectly in his orchestration of Erlkönig as Le Roi des aulnes (1860), serves as evidence of his esteem for the more exalted genre just as much as does his oft-stated scorn for salon romances and for the dilettante musicianship usually associated with them. Thus, to the notion of Berlioz the creator of the ideal romantic symphony has been wedded the notion of Berlioz the creator of the ideal romantic song.

Similarly, Les Nuits d'été, his “masterpiece,” seems to tower over all other “normal” contemporary song production. How then, in the “shadows” of Les Nuits d'été (to use Peter Bloom's expression), are we to view normal works in the category – including Berlioz's own – and how can such normal works enlighten our understanding of French song as a whole?

Romances

Berlioz's romances pose a problem for musicologists who adhere to the ideology of musical progress which demands that a composer canonized as a “genius” compose art for art's sake and put his stamp both upon the music of his own period and upon posterity. Indeed, Berlioz himself was instrumental in creating the concept of the “great composer” – his prime example was Beethoven – as the progressive genius who transgresses the conventions of musical genre.

Australian verse, throughout much of the nineteenth century, occupied an uncertain place in a predominantly utilitarian society. Foreign models and publications dominated the limited local market, while a virtual absence of patronage left poets exposed to the vagaries of government service, or the endless demands “imposed by sheep, on an indifferent run in a bad season”. Nevertheless, colonial writers were keenly aware that many national literatures were relatively recent formations. They knew that the liberation of the German states from Napoleonic France coincided with a rich literary efflorescence, and recognised how Irish aspirations for independence were accompanied by promising endeavours to awaken the Harp of Erin. These were heartening examples, but they in no way lessened the trials caused, in the words of one poet, by an “exotic culture which dwarfs or destroys all home sympathies, and surrounds its possessor with the bleak atmosphere of local indifference”. Calls for political and literary self-reliance culminated in the emergence of popular balladists in the 1890s, when poetry reflected and helped to shape growing national sentiment. By the 1920s, however, this creative impulse was largely exhausted. Nationalists were again underlining the need for “some sort of civilization ... to be built up in Australia if we are not to remain a meaningless jumble of creeds, cliques, classes”, and by the 1930s the interlinking of literature and nationhood was complicated by formalistic considerations. Modernist literary trends had been slow to make a major impact locally, and a generation of fledgling poets, born mainly during or in the aftermath of World War I, attempted to reconcile international movements with the quest for personal and national authenticity. Their efforts in the 1950s and beyond contributed decisively to the emergence of a local literature, and lent to Australian verse a resonance and self-assurance, anchored unselfconsciously in either local or overseas settings, which had been largely beyond the grasp of their predecessors.

THE THEATRE OF AUTHORITY

The predominantly English culture which invaded and settled in Australia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was steeped in performance as a means of asserting control over people and property. The official theatre of authority produced its first symbolic and theatrical act in the flag-raising ceremony by which Britain on 26 January 1788 convinced itself that it had legally taken “possession” of an entire continent already inhabited and controlled by hundreds of Aboriginal communities with quite different ritualised understandings of law, relationships to land, and performance. From that time forward the adventure and military dramas of colonisation and Empire provided understanding of actual historical events and processes, and were explicitly deployed in other quasi-theatrical displays. Military parades, naval pageants, staged battles and mock invasions displayed international political strength and threats as the Empire understood them. In the individual colonies rituals of public order ranging from civic ceremonies to the reading of the riot act laid out the boundaries of acceptable public behaviour and the hierarchies of authority within that community. Rituals of land division and acquisition established rights of lease and freehold title, and the growth of cities produced areas where ritualised public behaviour was not only allowed but expected. Such sites included not just theatres and public halls but also major thoroughfares, military parade grounds, public squares, points of embarkation and debarkation, historical sites, and other places which came to have symbolic significance in the overall mythology of nation-building.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century as Australia moved towards Federation, fiction writers began to depart from the generic conventions of romance and melodrama, and from the construction of the reader as essentially a British consumer looking for exotic and colourful tales of the colonies. Writers like Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin and Joseph Furphy were more interested in depicting what was “Australian” from an insider's point of view; the Australian landscape and ideas about the Australian “national character” moved to the foreground in fiction around the turn of the century.

This, at least, is how things appear to be. The truth is more complicated: in this as in all eras, the kind of fiction that had the best chances of survival, in both the short and the long term, was the kind encouraged by editors and publishers. As Susan Sheridan and others have argued, during this period women writers of "romance" fiction were edged out of the Australian picture by writers whose work addressed more overtly the issues around nationhood. Barbara Baynton, if anything an anti-romance writer, survived this particular cut but still had her work heavily edited, the better to fit prevailing ideas about what it ought to be. In turn-of-the-century Australia where editors and publishers were scarce, the few who did exist had disproportionate power over what sort of literature would be published, read and valued in its own society. An obvious example is the legendary A.G. Stephens of the Bulletin, an inspired and interventionist editor, later a publisher, with strong views about what Australian literature was and ought to be.