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Abstract

For Berlioz there are clear associations between music and the body: music can have a profoundly sublime affect upon his physical sensations, bypassing his rational mind to produce uncontrollable gestures. When Berlioz took to the podium, however, this relationship become complex; now, it was Berlioz’s physical gestures that had an affect upon the music. The one-way relationship between music and the body became a problematic symbiosis between the two – which influences which, and through what medium?

The medium, as the dissertation will explore, is gesture. Gesture was a blossoming aesthetic genre in Paris at the time: sign-language had been established in the previous century and was becoming more widespread; mime exploded with Gaspard Deburau’s Theatre des Funambles; and, with Habeneck and especially Berlioz, conducting developed a new vocabulary of gestures.

This dissertation will investigate the interdisciplinary connections between these forms of physical gesture, and how they all find a locus in Berlioz’s conducting during this period. Further, it will be argued that in this period the physical gesture of conducting was inexorably wedded to the social concerns with gender ambiguity; that the bodily aspect of conducting was seen not only artistically but also medically; and, how the relationship between the conductor, the composer and the performer became a problematic consideration for Berlioz: in conducting his own works the boundaries between composition and conducting began to dissolve.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Francesca Brittan of Queen’s College, University of Cambridge, for her tireless support of and enthusiasm for this dissertation.

Contents

List of Figures

1  Frédéric Peyson, Last Moments of the Abbé de l’Epée, 1839 (Paris, INJS). It depicts l’Epée on his deathbed surrounded by grieving pupils. At the left side of the picture can be seen the members of the National Assembly led by the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who declared: `Die in peace, the nation will adopt your children.’
2  Jerône-Martin Langlois, The Abbé Sicard Instructing His Deaf Pupils, 1806 (Paris, INJS).
3  By Cham, published in Charivari, 25 November 1855. The caption reads: `What should have been the composition of the orchestra conducted by M. Berlioz in the hall of the Universal Exhibition.’
4  This cartoon was published in Louis Reybaud, Jérôme Paturot à la recherce d’une position sociale (Paris, 1846). The caption reads: `Heureusement la salle est solide… elle résiste!‘ [Fortunately the hall is solid... it can stand the strain!].
5  François-Antoine Habeneck conducting. Drawing by Chalot after a bas-relief by Dantan the Younger. In Adolphe Jullien, Paris dilettante, etc. (Paris, 1884).
6  Berlioz’s indication for the beating of two and three beats in a bar.
7  Berlioz’s indication for the beating of five and seven beats in a bar, combining methods for beating two and three beats.
8  The manual alphabet devised by Bonet and adapted by l’Epée. From J. P. Bonet, Reducción de las Lettras y Arte para Enseñar à Ablar los Mudos (Madrid, 1620).
9  The electric baton, by Cham in Charivari (2 December 1855). The caption reads: `M. Berlioz takes advantage of his electric baton to direct an orchestra which will have its members in every part of the world.’

`As a conductor of his own compositions he was incomparable [...] His music, frequently rugged in contrasts and daring leaps, is also insinuating and suave at times, and so too was his conducting; one moment he would be high in the air, the next crouched under his desk; one moment he would menace the drummer, and the next flatter the flutist; now he would draw long threads of sound out of the violinists, and anon lunge through the air at the double basses, or with some daring remark help the violoncellists to draw a cantilena full of love-longing out of their thick bellied instruments. His musicians feared him and his demoniac, sarcastic face, and wriggled to escape unscathed from his talons.’

Anton Seidl on Hector Berlioz¹

`I remained with him, and hardly had the last member of the band vanished when Berlioz struck his forehead, exclaiming: `I have forgotten the overture!’ He stood speechless for a few minutes, then said with determination: `It shall go nevertheless.’ Now this overture was the one to Le Carnaval Romain, to be performed that evening for the first time, and never rehearsed [...] But to see Berlioz during that performance was a sight never to be forgotten. He watched over every single member of the huge band; his beat was so decisive, his indication of all the nuances so clear and so unmistakable, that the overture went smoothly, and no uninitiated person could guess at the absence of a rehearsal.’

Charles Hallé on Berlioz²

Introduction

The evening of 11 September 1827 marked one of the single most influential events in Hector Berlioz’s life. At the time Berlioz was still an emerging composer, and certainly no conductor. It was almost ten years to the day before he published his article arguing for the ideal `musical effect’ – the strange power that music should hold over the senses – yet that evening Berlioz witnessed an event that had absolute power over him but was not musical at all. It was, in part, completely devoid of sound altogether. The spectacle he was witness to drew its immense power from a palette of expressive gestures, strange bodily contortions and primal screams, through a figure that had all but abandoned rationality.

The young Harriet Smithson took to the Parisian stage as Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a production in the original English. Smithson, not speaking a word of French or being a great singer, was performing to an audience few of whom could understand English – Berlioz included. The result was a `musical’ performance of sorts: the audience could only grasp at the meanings from the tones and inflections of her voice and her physical gestures. Indeed, the most powerful moment in the whole play is a typically operatic moment, Ophelia’s mad scene, which relies heavily on body language and gesture. The role of Ophelia was traditionally taken by a singer capable of making something of the several songs in the scene.³

Yet the role itself is a relatively minor one, to which Smithson, a minor actress, was assigned. Her mad scene, however, stole the performance. The innovation that made her an instant star in Paris was her decision to play the scene in expressive pantomime – using physical gestures as the performance medium rather than spoken language or music. As Jules Janin recalled, Smithson was `an embodied revolution’, `when she moved, when she spoke, her charm mastered us. A whole society stirred to the magic of this woman.’⁴ Shakespeare’s immense success, Berlioz claimed, `was surpassed by Miss Smithson’s. No dramatic artist in France ever touched and excited the public as she did [...] The impression made on my heart and mind by her extraordinary talent, nay her dramatic genius was equalled only by the havoc wrought in me by the poet she so nobly interpreted.’⁵ As Katherine Kolb Reeve has argued, it was the physicality of and expressive gestures in Smithson’s performance that drew Berlioz into his love obsession with the actress.⁶

The rhetoric of these two accounts is symptomatic of an aesthetic genre that emerged in Paris between the last decade of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries. Throughout these fifty or so years there was incredible interest in the aesthetics and pathology of the body, of gesture, of movement, and in a philosophical search for a universal `biological’ language.⁷ In artistic spheres this became manifest in the search for the embodiment and physicality of genius, an exploration of the relationships between abstract inspiration and a very physical, often uncontrollable, bodily reaction.⁸ Berlioz was wholly caught up in this rhetoric:

On hearing certain pieces of music my vital forces seem to increase twofold; I feel an exquisite pleasure carried to a degree of violence rather entirely independent of my mind; habits of analysis then come of themselves to induce admiration; emotion, which grows in direct proportion to the energy and grandeur of the composer’s ideas, soon produces a strange agitation in my veins; my heart beats violently; tears, which ordinarily signal the end of the paroxysm, frequently mark only a stage of it, to be exceeded by far – in such cases there are spasmodic contractions of all my muscles, a trembling of all my limbs, a total numbing of my hands and feet, a partial paralysis of the optic and auditory nerves, my vision goes dark, I can barely hear; dizziness… near-faint.⁹

Whilst much has been made of Berlioz the Romantic composer and Berlioz the Romantic man within these intellectual tropes, very little has been studied of Berlioz the Romantic performer. This is in part Berlioz’s own fault – he was, at the best of times, only a mediocre instrumentalist. Hallé wrote that `Berlioz was no executant upon any instrument (for being able to strike a few chords on the guitar does not count) and he was painfully aware how much this was a hindrance to him’ and Richard Wagner remarked, `I had presented him with a copy of my Two Grenadiers, but could never really learn any more from him concerning what he really thought of it from the fact that as he could only strum a little on the guitar, he was unable to play the music of my composition to himself on the piano.’¹⁰

Berlioz’s contributions to conducting, however, are unquestioned and well documented as a turning point in the art.¹¹ Despite this, history has chiefly left us with Berlioz the composer as the locus for musicological thought. We easily and frequently debate, for example, the relationships between his Symphony Fantastique and Romanticism, the fantastic, autobiography, and literary criticism, yet rarely do we examine the performance of the work under the composer’s direction, as a piece generated by his physical gestures.¹² Similarly, we accept and document Berlioz’s developments as a conductor, yet have not given much consideration of the social and philosophical catalysts behind them.

As a way of investigating this gap left by musicology, this dissertation will attempt to posit the technical and aesthetic developments that Berlioz brought to conducting within the emerging French theories of inspired gesture, sign language, the divided-self of the Romantic artist, and the concept of the genius as a bodily, not abstract, phenomenon. It will investigate a critical dichotomy: between Berlioz as a virtuoso gestural technician and Berlioz as an inspired irrational genius, and how central the presence of this dichotomy is to his reception. It will further explore how the rhetoric and metaphors used to describe the orchestra changed, and how the French musical establishments reacted to Berlioz’s changes.

French Gestural Conservatism

Rousseau [...] directed his satirical comments against the manner of execution which was adopted at the Académie Royale. He called the conductors “woodchoppers” because of the heavy blows which they directed against the desk with a large piece of hard wood. [...] As soon as the movement is felt, and the impulse given, he abandons the singers and the orchestra until the moment when once again they need help in order to accelerate or retard the music.¹³

The French musical establishment from 1801 to 1867 was surprisingly conservative in its methods of performance direction. Its reluctance to adopt a baton director was symbolic of the establishment being torn between two gestural aesthetics: between the old school of `straight’ monosemic violin-bow direction and the new school of the `inspired’ polysemic gestures under a baton. It was only in 1867 that, symbolically, the last violin-bow director left the Paris Opéra, twelve years after the publication of Berlioz’s L’Art du chef d’orchestre, making France the last country to maintain this tradition by over forty years.¹⁴ Surprising because Berlioz and many of his French contemporaries were progressive musicians, and the French had been steadily establishing themselves as the European leaders in the philosophy and practice of expressive gesture – be it sign-language, pantomime, or its theoretical philosophies. Yet, they were almost backwardly afraid of its use; as Elliott Galkin remarks, `while the French were more progressive than musicians in other countries in formulating a theory of time-beating, they remained conservative in its practice.’¹⁵ How, and why, did a society that had such a rich and developed history of gestural semantics take so long to attempt to implement them?

When Berlioz first arrived in Paris, and indeed for many years thereafter, the major force in both conducting and Parisian musical politics was François-Antoine Habeneck (1781-1849).¹⁶ Habeneck’s insistence on using a bow to conduct, however, did have continual disadvantages: the length and weight of it made it frequently unwieldy; Berlioz indeed complained that for this reason the `saltarello’ in the second act of Benvenuto Cellini could not be played as fast as he wanted.¹⁷ Habeneck was also the first major conductor who was not a composer – his speciality lay in his incredible skill at the violin and, perhaps in part, because of this he often concentrated on purely pragmatic aspects of performance.¹⁸

Prior to the early nineteenth century, conducting, or musical direction, was essentially a procedure of time-beating: deciding, establishing, and maintaining a tactus for each movement of a piece – issues of musical aesthetic and emotional expression were chiefly the responsibility of the composer, generally not the players, and certainly not the director, and were thus kept removed from the public performance space.¹⁹ As quoted above, in 1820 Castil-Blazé wrote of the French insistence on audible time-beating, giving his disapproval of the move towards silent time-beating, as well as providing a description of the traditional unexpressive musical direction. Berlioz himself gave his opinion of the typical conductors he found in `two thirds of the lyric theaters in Europe’:

A single man who has no more idea of the art of conducting that that of singing, who is generally a poor musician, selected from among the worst pianists to be found, or who cannot play the pianoforte at all … some old superannuated individual, who, seated before a battered out-of-tune instrument, tries to decipher a dislocated score which he does not know, strikes false chords, major when they are minor, or vice-versa, and under the pretext of conducting, and of accompanying himself, employs his right hand in setting the choristers wrong in their time, and his left in setting them wrong in their tune.²⁰

Inspired Gesture: The Body of Genius

Considerations of deafness, sign-language, gestural communication, and the origins of language were not minor topics in post-Revolutionary French thought – they were quite central to the new philosophies. The aesthetic shift from the old style of formal violin-bow direction that was typically uninspiring and that kept emotional display to a minimum, to the new style of conductor who sought to inspire and enthuse his musicians did not emerge from nowhere; rather, the gestures, aesthetics, and literature on conducting were all articulations of parallel intellectual moves occurring in the other arts and intellectual circles. Under the loose headings of `inspiration’ and the `fantastic’, we can identify a trope that can be found in French writings from around the 1760s, and which gained momentum and weight over the next seventy years. Works like Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830) and Han d’Islande (1823), Frédéric Soulié’s Les Mémoires du Diableand (1838), Charles Nodier’s La Fée aux Miettes (1832), and indeed Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830), all came to typify this emerging trope. Philosopher’s such as Denis Diderot – philosopher, principal editor of the Encyclodédie, playwright and art critic – wrote progressively about musical aesthetics, a primary focus of which was on artistic creation, notions of genius, and physical responses to music. The painter Charles-Antoine Coypel, a little earlier, wrote that `the Rules of Declamation are needed for Painting, to reconcile the gesture with the expression on the face [...] by the lively expression of the gestures and actions that mutes ordinarily use to make themselves understood.’²¹

Figure 1: Frédéric Peyson, Last Moments of the Abbé de l’Epée, 1839 (Paris, INJS). It depicts l’Epée on his deathbed surrounded by grieving pupils. At the left side of the picture can be seen the members of the National Assembly led by the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who declared: `Die in peace, the nation will adopt your children.’

At the same time as the philosophical postulations made by Diderot, between 1750 and 1830 French philosophers and doctors made extraordinary developments in sign-language, medical understandings of deafness, deaf rights, and the philosophy of the origins of language; indeed, France is generally considered the fatherland of sign-language, making progress decades before other countries even recognised deafness as separate from dumbness or mental illness. Histories of sign-language typically identify France in this period as the pioneers. ²²

It was not until the latter half of the eighteenth century that serious attempts were made at formalising, teaching, and understanding gestural language and communication, and these developments were made almost exclusively in Paris by Abbé de l’Epée with his system of “signes méthodiques,” published in 1776 in his Institution des Sourds et Muets, par la voie des signes méthodiques; Ouvrage qui contient le Projet d’une Langue Universelle, par l’entremise des Signes naturels, assujettis à une Méthode.²³ The purpose of l’Epée’s work was not the discovery of a universal language, but as a system to educate the deaf. In close association with his pupils therefore, he evolved a language of manual signs that consisted of gestures used naturally and spontaneously by the deaf. In this way he was able to build up a highly developed language of methodical signs that was part natural and part conventional – a stress l’Epée was keen to make – his language was at the same time natural and highly developed, something that Berlioz too would claim a century later. As a medium for instructing the deaf, l’Epée’s work drew immense success, so much so, that by the middle of the next decade, as a result of his public demonstrations, the interest of royalty and scholars, and the continuation of his work in other countries, his work was known widely across Europe. In 1760-62 he opened the world’s first school for deaf in Paris, eventually under Royal Patronage. Whilst there is no concrete proof, it is not impossible that Berlioz would have had contact with the institution during his early years training to be a doctor. After his death in 1789, l’Epée became an iconic figure as the `emancipator of the deaf’; indeed, figure 1 shows a painting by Peyson, which became the first painting by a French deaf artist to gain widespread acclaim when presented at the Salon in 1839.

Figure 2: Jerône-Martin Langlois, The Abbé Sicard Instructing His Deaf Pupils, 1806 (Paris, INJS).

Following l’Epée’s death, his pupil and successor as Director of the Institution Nationale des Sourds et Muets, Abbé Roch-Ambroise Cucurron de Sicard (figure 2), took l’Epée’s work further in publishing a dictionary of signs in 1808 under the title Théorie des Signes pour l’instruction des Sourds-Muets.²⁴ This dictionary proved a detailed and extensive catalogue of gestural signs, for everything from the names of objects to more complex grammatical constructions. The work of l’Epée and Sicard put the consideration of gestural communication at the forefront of French thinking and scholarship: Condorcet, Garat, Lancelin, Laromiguiére, Destutt de Tracy, Roederer, and de Gérando all gave serious thought to the issue, as indeed had Diderot and Condillac a generation before them. When Berlioz took up the baton the gestural language he developed was not an isolated advance, and neither was it drawn exclusively from outside of France; rather, his conducting aesthetic was a subtle articulation of developing French theories of gesture.

Berlioz: Inspired Genius

Old Habeneck was not the medium of any abstract aesthetic inspiration – he was devoid of genius.²⁵

Both Berlioz’s own accounts of conducting and those of others who saw him conduct are saturated with a new rhetoric not found in descriptions of Habeneck and other earlier modern conductors: a rhetoric of inspiration, genius, madness, enthusiasm, possession, the sublime, and, the examination of all these within the bodily, anatomical spheres. Reeve observed that `when Berlioz heard a concert or an opera, others were likely to hear how it affected him. His responses to music were the very stuff of his letters and reviews, and they were vivid enough to have kept him in business as a critic for thirty years.’²⁶ Francesca Brittan notes an example of Berlioz’s intensity of expression and musical response:

Oh, if only I did not suffer so much!… So many musical ideas are seething within me [...] I feel it with an intense energy, and I shall do it, have no doubt, if I live. Oh, must my entire destiny be engulfed by this overpowering passion?… Everything I’ve suffered would enhance my musical ideas. I would work non-stop… my powers would be tripled, a whole new world of music would spring fully armed from my brain, or rather, from my heart.²⁷

This passage not only outlines a rhetoric of a sublime overwhelming passion, but also an important dichotomy around the conditions for artistic endeavour. This dichotomy is essentially between the rational and the irrational, inspired genius and technical craftsmanship, and was debated intensively at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is found throughout Berlioz’s writings and in other’s accounts of him, and is central to understanding his conducting. Berlioz himself writes in his L’Art du chef d’orchestre:

[The orchestral conductor] should possess – besides the especial talent of which we shall presently endeavor to explain the constituent qualities – other almost indefinable gifts, without which an invisible link cannot establish itself between him and those he directs; the faculty of transmitting to them his feeling is denied him, and thence power, empire, and guiding influence completely fail him.²⁸

The `irrational’ subjection to music that Berlioz felt was noticed by others; Hallé wrote in 1838, early on in Berlioz’s conducting career, of Berlioz’s total immersion in music:

There never lived a musician who adored his art more than did Berlioz; he was indeed “enthusiasm personified”…²⁹

And Camille Saint-Saëns wrote about L’enfance du Christ:

I can perfectly remember the performances that the composer himself directed: they were more lively, more animated than the well-prepared but languid performances to which Édouard Colonne has accustomed us.³⁰

Now, consider the following similar passage:

Thereupon he began to execute a quite extraordinary fugue. At one moment the theme was solemn and full of majesty and at the next light and frolicsome, at one moment he was imitating the bass and the next one of the upper parts. With outstretched arms and neck he indicated the held notes, and both performed and composed a song of triumph in which you could see he was better versed in good music than in good conduct.³¹

Although sounding similar to accounts of Berlioz, this quotation, not about Berlioz, is taken from Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), originally written in the 1760s or 1770s, although not published until 1805 in a translation by Goethe. Yet, both the form and content closely echo Berlioz’s conducting. The dialogue takes place between a Diderot like figure and a certain nephew of Jean-Philippe Rameau, a music teacher and professional parasite. Set in a Parisian café frequented by chess players, the end of their conversation turns to a discussion of music. Here and in many parts of Le neveu de Rameau, there is a sense of ceaseless animation and inexhaustible energy coupled with a rapid and frivolous switching of topic and character displayed by the Nephew; characteristics found frequently in descriptions of Berlioz on the podium – his desire to achieve everything at once, to direct and control all the parts simultaneously, to play rather than direct the instruments. Indeed, thirteen years before the publication of L’Art du chef d’orchestre, Berlioz wrote of the influence a conductor must hold over his musicians:

Identifying the players with himself, exciting them by his zeal, animating them with his own enthusiasm, and imparting to them his own inspiration.³²

In 1852 Berlioz was employed to lead the newly-formed Philharmonic Society of London in a presentation of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Francis Hueffer (1843-1889), and eminent British critic, wrote of Berlioz’s performance:

Berlioz knew the score by heart, and threw his soul into its perfect rendering; and his enthusiasm had communicated itself to every man in the orchestra, and every singer in the chorus.³³

The Nephew, `with outstretched arms and neck’, is reminiscent of Berlioz’s early attempts at conducting – in his desire to control and engage aesthetically with music he produces grotesque and unwieldy gestures: as Gaspare Spontini wrote to Berlioz in November 1843, `Producing narrower, less expansive movements, this would cover less space and be less fatiguing for your arm, your head, and the whole of your body, and would give greater clarity and precision.’³⁴

Diderot, in collapsing of the distinction between performance and composition, `[he] both performed and composed a song of triumph’, highlights the challenge to Berlioz’s own conducting and his reception: the complex web of issues surrounding performing one’s own works. Where is the line between composition and performance? Is performance a part of the `work’, or are the two separable acts? If not, what are the implications of someone else performing Berlioz’s compositions? It is further symptomatic of the aesthetic and philosophical challenge already explored by Diderot: must one be moved oneself in order to move others? If composition is the creative, moving, act, then must performance also be, or rather, should the players be moved by the composer’s music and/or his `performance’ on the podium?

On 10 September 1837 Berlioz published an article in Revue et Gazette musicale in which he debated what Reeve has described as the `musical effect’:<sup>35</sup> intensely graphical accounts of moving responses to music, leading to moments of convulsive ecstasy and sublimation; moments which are found resonating throughout Berlioz’s music as well as his literature.<sup>36</sup> When Berlioz wrote of this `musical effect’ he, like contemporary French scholars, traced his responses to music back to the fabled ones of classical antiquity, citing how his responses were no more unusual or unnatural than those before. Critically though, Berlioz failed to include the fears and outright warnings that Plato in his Republic made about the powers of music: how music is debilitating to men and therefore dangerous to the state; how the subjugation and `ravishment’ that Berlioz exalts were, for Plato, passive, feminine, depraved and reprehensible. For Plato, art in performance was the most dangerous of all – performers were infectious carriers of an unstoppable chain of emotions that bypassed rational control and directly effected the heart. This view was pervasive for Berlioz too, when the point was brought home to him by his own father, whom, violently against Berlioz abandoning his medical training in favour of a career in the Theatre and marrying an actress, wrote that `the state of enthusiasm’ – the classical term for both the effect and the trace like (opium induced) state that artistic creation required – `destroys all the qualities of the heart and makes the men possessed by it weak, immoral, selfish, and contemptible.’³⁷

This dichotomy surrounding the emotional state of a performer, for Berlioz as a conductor, has its roots not only in Plato but also in Classical rhetoric, which stipulated that writers should feel the emotions they write about. `If you would make me weep, you must weep yourself’ (pour me tirer des pleurs, il faut que vous pleuriez) wrote Boileau, the father of French classicism; by logical extension, a performer must weep if he is to make his audience weep.<sup>38</sup> For Diderot in the second half of the eighteenth century, these demands for `imaginative sympathy’, as Reeve describes, lie at the heart of his `Conversations on The Natural Son‘. It was to enhance the emotional involvement of the spectator that Diderot recommended the banning of spectators from the stage and a more natural style of acting and movement, and, crucially, that performers should totally identify with their portrayed characters: an audience’s disbelief must be suspended from start to finish. In 1830 French Romanticism truly bloomed with Victor Hugo’s Hernani and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, both works that fully embraced Diderot’s mandate: the Symphonie Fantastique, with its programatic autobiographical backdrop and dense intertwining of the spheres of composer and composition, would, in a performance that Berlioz himself conducted, have been the zenith of the problem Diderot saw: Berlioz the conductor was simultaneously the author, the character, and the performer in his musical works.

There are some composers who, when they are conducting their own works, are only too happy if they can avoid making fatiguing demands on the performers. But this kind of modest restraint was not for him [Berlioz] – besides, the difficulties which his compositions present put it completely out of the question.³⁹

Yet, 1830 also saw the posthumous publication of Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien in which he flamboyantly retracted his the core of his earlier argument: the best actors are not the ones who are themselves moved, but rather, those who are emotionally detached and distant from the characters they portray. Only then can they possess the self-mastery required to assume a given role.

This apparent shift in opinion by Diderot also happened to Berlioz and his conducting in the half-decade after Symphonie Fantastique, at precisely the same time that he developed his conducting technique and began to appear in serious roles as a conductor.⁴⁰ In 1834 he wrote to Mlle Falcon playing Julia in La Vestale, `I caution the singer to resist the musical effect with all her might: she can vent her feelings when she gets backstage’; and he wrote in a review of Fanny Elssler dancing Fenella in Auber’s Muette de Portici in 1837 that `she moves because she is moved, and because she knows nonetheless how to master her emotion, to a certain extent, in order to enable art to maintain its supremacy.’⁴¹ By the time Berlioz was an internationally respected conductor in 1863 he wrote, `Despite Boileau, if you would make me weep, you must not weep yourself.’⁴² It is telling that the development of his technique came in parallel to the emancipation of his emotional evolvement in his conducting, as the next chapter will explore.

Yet this ideological shift hides something of an hypocrisy, or at least disagreement: accounts of Berlioz’s conducting have more in common with Rameau’s Nephew than they do with Berlioz’s own preaching. A little later in the tale, the Nephew begins to describe the beauty and power of music:

(And off he went, walking up and down and humming some of the tunes from L’Isle des fous, Le Peintre amoureux de son modéle, Le Maréchal-ferrant, and La Plaideuse) and now and again he raised his hands and eyes to heaven and exclaimed: “Isn’t that beautiful! God, isn’t it beautiful! How can anyone wear a pair of ears on his head and question it?” He began to warm up and sang, at first softly; then as he grew more impassioned, he raised his voice and there followed gestures, grimaces, and bodily contortions [...] He sang thirty tunes on top of each other and all mixed up: Italian, French, tragic, comic, of all sorts and descriptions, sometimes in a bass voice going down to the infernal regions, and sometimes bursting himself in a falsetto voice he would split the heavens asunder, talking off the walk, deportment, and gestures of the different singing parts: in turn raging, pacified, imperious, scornful.⁴³

The similarities to Seidl’s account quoted earlier, or this by Hiller noting Berlioz’s crazed enthusiasm when on the podium, are clear:

Berlioz had an extraordinary gift. His personality quickly won him the sympathy of his players, which grew as they came to recognize the fire, the clear-sightedness, the utter devotion, body and soul, that he dedicated to the job at hand. If he sometimes appeared, from the outside, to be exerting himself more than was necessary, and if in so doing he attracted the attention of the listener to his platform behavior, this was entirely without self-consciousness; he had no desire to present himself as a virtuoso conductor (the worst species of virtuosos that exists), but was solely interested in giving his music the importance it deserved. [...] His immense inner tension, his anxiety that everything might not go as he wanted it, perhaps made itself too much felt; he didn’t simply stimulate the musicians, he drove them to a frenzy, and even the excellent orchestral players in London complained to me that they were nervous under his direction. But that was their affair – the outcome was superb. ⁴⁴

Whilst on the surface the language and rhetoric are clearly closely related between these quotations, there are also much deeper connections. In Rameau’s Nephew, at the point quoted above where the Nephew begins to sing, the syntactic separation between the signifier and the signified begins to collapse: the reader is left unsure as to `where’ the music is taking place. There emerges a great deal of ambiguity about the space the music occupies – it is not a literal retelling of an account of the Nephew singing, but rather, it is presented in such a way as to make the reader become part of the music. Thus, the distinction between the composers of the songs and the Nephew’s performances of them is left unsure: is the Nephew making the songs up as he goes along? Clearly not, but why not say so? Because, presumably, the point Diderot is making is that the performer becomes the music he is performing. Further, the entire tale is told in the form of a Platonic dialogue between He and I, surely a deliberate reference to the logicality of classical philosophical texts. Yet, it is precisely at the moment that Romantic music appears – L’Isle des fous, Le Peintre amoureux de son modéle, Le Maréchal-ferrant, and La Plaideuse – that the He/I dichotomy ceases; similarly, Berlioz’s new Romantic music – Symphony Fantastique, Harold in Italy, Faust – deliberately stands in support of the infectious, controlling power of music that Plato feared. Berlioz, then, has a somewhat easier task; he already is the music he’s performing, as he himself composed it. These quotations confirm exactly that – they make very ambiguous the distinction between Berlioz’s music and conducting.

Moving ahead of Diderot by several decades, we come to the musical aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann. In many respects, Hoffmann’s aesthetics are a natural extension of Diderot’s: concepts of Romantic genius and divine inspiration that were also common to Herder, Hamann, and Goethe can easily be traced through Hoffmann. The view of nature as a finite manifestation of the infinite which underpinned this conception of genius was articulated through the aesthetic category of the `sublime’. It was also central to the definition of genius which Kant presented in `Analytic of the Sublime’ in the Critique of Judgement as `the innate mental predisposition through which nature gives the rule to art.’<sup>45</sup> Similarly, Herder suggested that a genius is subservient only to the `rules of Nature’ and that he must `abandon himself to the inspiration of the happy hour’ in order to express `passion and feeling’;⁴⁶ in Aesthetic in nuce: A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose (1762), Hamann emphasised that, as `a counterpart of God in miniature’, the artist music create wholly in accordance with his natural instincts.’<sup>47</sup> Goethe stated that `Nature works according to laws she laid down her herself in concord with the Creator; art works according to rules which she has agreed upon with the genius.’⁴⁸

These conceptions of genius and divine inspiration offer a hypothesis for why Berlioz almost solely conducted his own works. Of all 177 concerts Berlioz conducted in his lifetime, over 100 were just of his own works – he had little desire to conduct other’s music, and usually did so only out of political and programming necessity. Conducting his own works closed the gap between the divine genius creating works from Nature and the audience:

Unhappy composers! Know how to conduct, and how to conduct yourselves well (with or without a pun), for do not forget that the most dangerous of your interpreters is the conductor himself.⁴⁹

Yet, this conception of genius presented by Diderot, Goethe, Hamann, and Herder is polemical only in so far as it is a reaction against the hegemony of reason in the Enlightenment – against the neoclassical doctrine of mimesis as the basis for the evaluation of art. Where Hoffmann’s aesthetic begins to find real resonance with Berlioz is in its admittance of the grotesque, the insane, the mad, and the ugly into art, and the breaking rather than conformity to pre-established rules. As Wheeler notes, he `strove to replace objective representation of nature with subjective representation of feeling, and the simplicity of ancient art [...] with the complexity and turmoil of [...] the unconscious.<sup>50</sup> Hoffman’s account of the composer Heinrich of Ofterdingen in The Singer’s Contest describes how his `wild and distracted condition increased upon him every day; gloomier and more restless grew his glance, paler [...] his cheek’, and how his `songs bewailed the immeasurable pain of earthly existence, and were [...] like the wailing cry of one who is mortally hurt, and longs in vain for death’⁵¹ – an account extremely close in rhetoric to accounts of Berlioz composing at the time of the Symphony Fantastique; Friedrich Zelter wrote to Goethe in a letter saturated with the grotesque:

There are some people who can only make their presence felt and call attention to their activities by means of noisy puffing, coughing, croaking, and spitting. One such appears to be Herr Hector Berlioz. The smell of sulphur surrounding Mephistopheles attracts him, so he must sneeze and snort till all the instruments of the orchestra leap around in a perfect frenzy – only not a hair stirs on Faust’s head. Thank you for sending me the music all the same. I shall certainly find an opportunity when I am teaching to make use of the poisonous abscess, the abortion born of horrible incest.⁵²

It was precisely this grotesque aesthetic, however, that came to define the body of Berlioz’s work, and, indeed descriptions of his conducting. But the difficulty for Berlioz came in drawing the line between enthusiasm and insanity, between inspiration and madness, whether consciously or not. This line is a frequent trope in Hoffmann’s descriptions of the fictitious composer Johannes Kreisler, whom he described as a musician in whom `many thought they had observed signs of madness’, who, `was tossed back and forth by his inner visions and dreams as though on an eternally stormy sea’, and who, during his `fantasizing’ at the piano, `reached a point from which he usually plunged into a dark abyss of inconsolable lamentation.’⁵³ Like Kreisler, Berlioz was frequently troubled by both his musical compositions and his conducting, oscillating between certainty and success on the one hand, and despair and failure on the other; between radically breaking from conventional musical aesthetics and wanting to be part of them.⁵⁴

For Berlioz, on the one hand, as Chantler describes, `Wackenroder’s and Hoffmann’s insistence that the enthusiasm of genius must not be constrained by pre-established rules was intrinsically linked to their evaluation of art by reference to the aesthetic postulate of originality and to their conception of enthusiasm as an innate quality that cannot be taught.’<sup>55</sup> Kant too, stated that `genius is a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given [...]; hence the foremost property of genius must be originality’ and that `the artist’s skill cannot be communicated but must be conferred directly on each person by the hand of nature.’⁵⁶ On the other hand, a developed technique was absolutely necessary to achieve this inspired genius.

Thus the key to the dialectic of Berlioz’s conducting aesthetic is the transmission of his compositional genius: genius cannot be communicated to players by formal technique alone, but rather by some intangible touch of the hand of Nature. Berlioz’s music, so formally and aesthetically different from that before it – either through ignorance, lack of training, or deliberate intent – thus required a new style of conducting to communicate, a style not of the formal violin-bow direction of Habeneck, but of the grotesque, insane, genius. Berlioz’s conducting style was a response to his whole musical aesthetic; as Heinrich Heine wrote in 1844:

In the one [Berlioz], striking effects of light and shadow, in the other [Briton] a fiery instrumentation; in the one a poor sense of melody, in the other a poor sense of colour; in both little beauty and no feeling. Their works are neither Classical nor Romantic, neither reminiscent of Greece or the Catholic Middle Ages. Rather, they signal something higher, the Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian age of architecture, and the massive passion that it expressed.⁵⁷

Despite acknowledging the insufficiency of craftsmanship as the basis for the creation of a metaphysical art and their emphasis on the divine inspiration, Berlioz, like Wackenroder and Hoffmann, nevertheless cannot abandon the reason of the Enlightenment. They followed Kant in asserting that `a striving toward knowledge of the infinite, was a rational, and not merely irrational, striving,’<sup>58</sup> with Wackenroder claiming that `this man [Leonardo da Vinci] is certainly elevated above other human beings’ because his `divine flash’ is accompanied by `the study of the secrets of the paintbrush’ and `the most industrious observation,’⁵⁹ and Hoffmann stating:

A composer has truly penetrated the secrets of harmony only if he can use its power to affect the human heart. For him the numerical relationships that remain lifeless formulas for the pedant without genius become magical prescriptions from which he conjures forth an enchanted world.⁶⁰

For Berlioz, the exact same thing is true of his conducting, and indeed, is the very reason that he wrote L’Art du chef d’orchestre:

The orchestral conductor should [...] possess – besides the especial talent of which we shall presently endeavour to explain the constituent qualities – other almost indefinable gifts, without which an invisible link cannot establish itself between him and those he directs; the faculty of transmitting to them his feeling is denied him, and thence power, empire, and guiding influence completely fail him. He is then no longer a conductor, a director, but a simple beater of the time – supposing he knows how to beat it, and divide it, regularly.⁶¹

Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, written in 1757, is a locus of gestural aesthetics, and provides a codified manual of specific rational events or concepts that lead to sublime irrational responses: essentially the same function as Berlioz’s L’Art du chef d’orchestre.⁶² Where Berlioz’s treatise is a manual of technical gestures to express music, Burke’s work is almost a catalogue for Romantic artists of aesthetic tropes ready to be used in pursuing the sublime. Burke locates the sublime in Nature, and then goes on to identify different experiences that lead to the sublime, the abandonment of rational awareness. It is very possible to locate these sublime aesthetics within Berlioz’s compositions, particularly Symphony Fantastique and Faust; invoking a frightful, ancient other-world of giants, monsters, and fated civilizations, Heinrich Heine casts Berlioz in a surreal world recalling the myths of Babylon and Nineveh:

Today [April 25, 1844] we shall begin with Berlioz, whose first concert served to open and inaugurate the musical season. Works not exactly new brought a fair reward of applause and even the slowest minds were carried away by the violence of the genius revealing itself in every creation of this great master. The beating of the wings in this music betray the presence of no ordinary singing bird; this is a colossal nightingale, a skylark of the size of an eagle such as existed in a primordial, lost world. Indeed, to me, Berlioz’s music in general has something primeval, if not straightforwardly antediluvian, about it, reminding me of animal species now extinct, of legendary kingdoms and sins, of piled-up impossibilities: of Babylon, of the hanging gardens of Semiramide, of Nineveh, of the wonders of Mizraim, such as we can see on the paintings of the Englishman [John] Martin. Indeed, if we look for an analogy in painting, then we see the elective affinity between Berlioz and this fantastic Briton: the same taste for the colossal and monstrous, for the gigantic, for material immeasurableness. In the one, striking effects of light and shadow, in the other a fiery instrumentation; in the one a poor sense of melody, in the other a poor sense of colour; in both little beauty and no feeling. Their works are neither Classical nor Romantic, neither reminiscent of Greece or the Catholic Middle Ages. Rather, they signal something higher, the Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian age of architecture, and the massive passion that it expressed.⁶³

Figure 3: By Cham, published in Charivari, 25 November 1855. The caption reads: `What should have been the composition of the orchestra conducted by M. Berlioz in the hall of the Universal Exhibition.’

Similarly, the artist Cham published a sketch of his impression of Berlioz conducting his own works (figure 3) which clearly shows a collection of exotic, foreign characters playing a collection of weird and wonderful instruments, very reminiscent of Burke and Hiene. We find resonances of Burke in Berlioz – most striking is how close Burke comes to Hoffmann and Wackenroder in the distinction between `inspiration’ and rational control. Yet Burke goes on to outline the problems of communicating this this dichotomy or locating oneself within it. Burke writes `of the difference between clearness and obscurity with regard the passions’:

It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination. If I make a drawing of a palace, or a temple, or a landscape, I present a very clear idea of those objects; but then [...] my picture can at most affect only as the palace, temple, or landscape would have affected in reality. On the other hand, the most lively and spirited verbal description I can give, raises a very obscure and imperfect idea of such objects; but then it is in my power to raise a stronger emotion by the description than I could do by the best painting [...] In reality a great clearness helps but little towards affecting the passions, as it is in some sort an enemy to enthusiasms whatsoever.⁶⁴

If we accept Burke, then it is not surprising to find a great deal of obscurity in Berlioz’s conducting, particularly when compared to the clarity and formalism of the traditional French school of Habeneck; if every gesture is absolutely clear then there is little room for the imagination and enthusiasm. Yet, the challenge for Berlioz is more complex. By the time Berlioz was an established conductor there is absolutely no reason to believe he was ever intentionally unclear; rather, that his gestures were measured in such a way as to allow for the aesthetic of the possibility of obscurity, where Habeneck’s were not. One only needs to look at the great conductors of our day to see exactly this – where Habeneck may have beaten time throughout a piece, the modern conductor after Berlioz is allowed the freedom to clearly make unclear gestures. Players are not unsure as to the meaning of a gesture, but rather, are sure that the gesture is meant to be one of obscurity. Burke too hints at this difficulty of communicating the sublime and the unclear. He goes on to remark on a `poetical’ poem of Satan by Milton, that:

In what does this poetical picture contain? In images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutions of kingdoms. The mind is hurried out of itself by a crowd of great and confused images; which affect because they are crowded and confused. For separate them, and you lose much of the greatness, and join them, and you infallibly lose the clearness. The images raised by poetry are always of the obscure kind; though in general the effects raised by poetry are by no means to be attributed to the images it raises. [...] A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea. ⁶⁵

So for Berlioz, the meaning raised by conducting is always of the obscure kind; though in general the effects raised by conducting are by no means to be attributed to the music it raises. Clear – uninspired – conducting is another name for poor conducting.

Gendering the Conductor Genius

Despite this rich history of French gestural aesthetics from Diderot and Condillac to l’Epée, there must be some reason for the French musical establishment to take fifty years longer than most other countries to properly move to baton conducting. Where Berlioz was touring the world very successfully, Habebeck remained in stolid control in France. The difficulty for the French lay in the social climate in the aftermath of the Revolutions: frequent political instability had resulted in a breakdown of the previously assumed power of patriarchal authority that led to an association of the Terrors with such a breakdown. Thus, French society began to drive binary divides through itself to try and maintain social hierarchies, divides based around constructions of race, class, and as Michel Foucault has described, a marginalisation of `them’ – the others, the criminals, the handicapped, the poor – from the rest of society.<sup>66</sup> One of most powerful binary oppositions that came to be enforced was that of gender – whose post-Revolutionary construction, and particularly its relationship with physicality and gesture, does much to clarify our understanding of Berlioz’s mixed reception as a conductor. In the first half of the nineteenth century, gender ambiguity is dealt with in the medical and scientific discourses as a kind of `mania’: be it `melancholia’, `lypemania’, `demonomania’, or `erotomania’.⁶⁷ Any fluidity of gendered meanings was to be purged from public and private spheres for the sake of preserving the sanctity of masculine power. The great paradox for Romantic artists was the very act of creativity itself – an activity seen as simultaneously masculine in its teleological `productivity’ and feminine in its `sensitivity’ and `seductiveness’. The composer thus sat on dangerous line between rational masculinity and an irrational, mad, feminine. As Elaine Showalter and Catherine Clément have shown, madness was often linked to an excess of feminine sexuality, usually designated as an array of forms of hysteria.<sup>68</sup> These associations of gender ambiguity and mania were typically run through a discourse that medicalised the body, with the feminine as the perfect exemplar of `the bodily’. Indeed, before Le neveu de Rameau, Diderot had, in `Conversations on The Natural Son‘ (`Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel’), critically conceived enthusiasm as a pathological condition which `is born of some object in nature’, and which causes `a man [that] has been granted the gift of genius’ to become, in a fashion similar to accounts of Berlioz, `absorbed, agitated, tormented’.⁶⁹As Showalter notes of Smithson:

The Romantics [...] were captivated by the spectacle of Ophelia’s sexuality and emotionality. Passionately portrayed by the Irish ingenue Harriet Smithson in Paris productions of the 1830s, Ophelia became an obsession for the century’s artists. In her mad scenes, Smithson wore a long black veil, suggestive of the symbolism of female sexual mystery that permeates the Gothic novel, and scattered Bedlamish straw in her hair.⁷⁰

It is hardly surprising that Berlioz fell in love with this woman: she embodied much of his musical aesthetic. For early nineteenth-century French intellectuals the associations between the body, hysteria, gesture, and the feminine was a problematic that they only partly found a way around. Philosophers, like l’Epée and his study of gesture, rooted their work firmly in classical and Enlightenment thought; thus gesture could be kept firmly in the rational sphere, safe from the problematic feminine. By echoing the fears that Plato articulated two-thousand years earlier – that the acting out of emotions was a feminine act, dangerous and degrading for men – they put themselves in a paradox of the their own creating: a great deal of theorising on gesture was possible, without actually being put into practice. Indeed, as the next chapter will show, l’Epée’s work quickly moved from a system of polysemic gestures to a heavily formalised system of distinctly monosemic ones, a move that essentially drove out gender ambiguity from a physical activity.

Thus, the maintenance of the violin-bow conductor in the major musical establishments was a way of keeping potentially unsafe, feminising gestures, that were typified by Berlioz, out of the heart of French culture, preferring instead the masculine, ordered, clear direction of the violin-bow director.

Berlioz: Technical Magician

When Berlioz saw Smithson as Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet he fell completely in love with her.⁷¹ Yet, as has already been mentioned, Smithson spoke not a word of French nor could she sing. In short, she had no linguistic method of communicating with her audience. Berlioz, too, when in front of an orchestra, had no audible method of communicating. Yet both were incredibly successful in their vocations – Smithson taking Paris by storm and Berlioz becoming of the greatest conductors of the century. The key to both lies in a very formidable technique: Smithson was highly trained and an extremely capable mimetic actress, and Berlioz, quite literally, wrote the book on modern conducting technique.

Figure 4: This cartoon was published in Louis Reybaud, Jérôme Paturot à la recherce d’une position sociale (Paris, 1846). The caption reads: `Heureusement la salle est solide… elle résiste!‘ [Fortunately the hall is solid... it can stand the strain!].

Berlioz developed a specific baton technique that had not existed in Paris previously – one suited to the communication of the genius and the sublime. Habeneck had essentially conducted solely with a violin bow, and indeed, often conducted from the first violin part to save having to turn so many pages.⁷² As mentioned earlier, it was almost paradoxical that whilst Paris was one of the most avant-gardé musical centers in Europe, in its conducting traditions it stayed quite conservative. Whilst accounts of Habeneck and even his students, Gerard, Hainl, Tilmant et al., display an accomplished technique, they pale in comparison to the accounts of Berlioz’s almost wizardry and magical technique with a baton. Compare, for example, figures 4 and 5: one showing Habeneck conducting with a violin bow from the first violin part, the other the suave Berlioz with his armies of musicians.

Figure 5: François-Antoine Habeneck conducting. Drawing by Chalot after a bas-relief by Dantan the Younger. In Adolphe Jullien, Paris dilettante, etc. (Paris, 1884).

Naturally, the place to start an analysis of Berlioz’s conducting technique is his treatise, L’Art du chef d’orchestre. This twelve-page study was the first to consider the conductor as a specialist, distinct from a time-beating composer or a violin-bow leader. The manual was incredibly thorough and detailed in its discussion of conducting technique, as well as containing valuable commentary on the roles and responsibilities of a conductor. The treatise proved immediately popular, and was soon translated into German, English and Italian.⁷³

Through his treatise Berlioz became the first French conductor to acknowledge that there even was such thing as a technique, remarking that it was `as specialised as the violinist’s. It is acquired only by long practice, and only if one has a very marked natural aptitude for it.’<sup>74</sup> More specifically, what Berlioz recognised was not a technique for time-beating, for such a thing had existed for several centuries (resonating back to Lully) but a technique for expressive baton conducting. Although baton conducting took two or three decades longer to gain hold in Paris than it did elsewhere in Europe, many people remarked on the effectiveness of Berlioz’s baton style. Ryan remembered that `his beating was emphatic and intelligible, and the mass of instrumentalists followed the slightest indication of his baton, the minutest shade of expression which he desired to obtain, with marvellous accuracy’; Rimsky-Korsakov reported from Russia that `Berlioz’s beat was simple, clear, beautiful. No vagaries at all in shading’; and, César Cui described Berlioz thus, `from a plastic point of view, what simplicity in his pose, what a sobriety, and at the same time what precision of gesture!’⁷⁵ For Smithson as much as Berlioz, however, the beauty of technique lies in its transparency, its subservience to a greater artistic aim; and, that this shift in emphasis from technical orientated to expression orientated was symptomatic of the change between the violin-bow direction in the Ancient Regieme and the modern French conductor.

Despite this emphasis on technique, Berlioz’s conducting stands apart from every other contemporary musical development in its inaudibility. Violinists, pianists, singers all create in sound: conductors create in silence. Whilst there are a great many metaphorical similarities between conducting and other instruments – the baton is like a violin bow, the breath like that of a wind player, the eye contact that of a singer – they are sonically fundamentally different. For Berlioz nearly all his musical performance and practice was silent, for composition too is both essentially a silent and non-performatitive act. His almost complete lack of training within the French musical establishment left him an outsider, largely until he won the Prix de Rome, and even then he had a great many skeptics within the institutions. Yet, this lack of training is what forced him to develop his new style. He could not have been a violin-bow director had he even wanted for he could not play the violin. He never played the piano, so lacked any association with the elite musicians, and he never had a great desire to conduct the works of others. It is not surprising to find a musician like Berlioz being the first to greatly develop a thorough and expressive gestural technique – apart from composition, conducting was the only musical activity he was any good at. Thus, to try and trace his development as a conductor from the French school of violin-bow direction is somewhat futile; certainly, it may have been partly a reaction against the tradition, but there is much more fertile discovery to be made elsewhere within the work of l’Epée and Sicard.

First, the purpose of Berlioz’s treatise and those of l’Epée and Sicard are remarkably similar, even if approaching different gestural topics. Both begin with the logical and philosophical separation of technique and meaning, the sign and the signifier. Berlioz does so by initially arguing that technique is only the vehicle by which artistic expression can be achieved, yet without which nothing would be possible, and that therefore a gestural system that is universally understood is needed, and indeed, is thus the most basic prerequisite for a successful conductor. By making the distinction between abstract technique and musical meaning he is able to separate the two and focus almost exclusively on the former in his treatise, but with the tacet assumption that technique is not in and of itself. l’Epée made a near identical move at the start of his work, if more philosophical. He challenged the philosophies of Diderot and Condillac that had traced gesture to an earlier stage in the evolution of language: for Diderot and Condillac communication began with the idea, developed into the gesture, and became articulated by the word.

Thus, communication by gesture was essentially a primitive act, a step back for human development. Hence, the purpose of l’Epée’s work was to create a system of signs which would bridge the void between gesture and language – a way of speaking to the eyes rather than the ears. For Condillac it was only through language that man could develop intelligence and memory, and thus the deaf were classified as dumb; for l’Epée the separation of gesture from language allowed him to develop a system of gestures that replicated language, and thus elevated the deaf from the status of the dumb.⁷⁶ He, in the exact same logical step as Berlioz, was thus able to create a dictionary of gestures that had abstract meanings, which would then be employed with a system of supplementary logic to create language. Where Berlioz had gestures for beating two or three or four beats in a bar irrespective of the musical content of the bars, l’Epée had gestures for the letter `a’, a woman, or greatness, say. Yet a divergence occurs in the systems of supplementary logic that each employ: l’Epée’s system of gestures are to be superimposed with a grammatical system of spoken and written language – verbs, tenses, agreements and so on; Berlioz’s, however, are to be superimposed with the ambiguous and semiotically fluid language of music. Where l’Epée constructs logical meaning from his system of gestures, Berlioz destructs logical meaning by putting it to the service of music. l’Epée takes logic and develops it, Berlioz starts with logic and uses it to express the irrational. Yet, in both cases, they must first establish a system of universally understood gestures.

Figure 6: Berlioz’s indication for the beating of two and three beats in a bar.

Thus, second, the way Berlioz and l’Epée present their gestural systems are intensely systematised and hierarchal: they begin by presenting a very basic category of gestures, upon which more developed gestures are built. These in turn are coupled to create further more complex gestural categories. For Berlioz this pedagogical method begins with gestures for beating two and three beats in a bar (figure 6) and then systematically combining them to create four, five, six and seven beats in a bar (figure 7). l’Epée used a similar system of hierarchal gestures: his course moved rapidly from an introduction, to general principles of naming, to complex grammatical formulae.⁷⁷ Figure 8 shows part of the manual alphabet he introduces early on in his guide, which later gets combined with grammatical constructions to mimic language.

Figure 7: Berlioz’s indication for the beating of five and seven beats in a bar, combining methods for beating two and three beats.

Figure 8: The manual alphabet devised by Bonet and adapted by l’Epée. From J. P. Bonet, Reducción de las Lettras y Arte para Enseñar à Ablar los Mudos (Madrid, 1620).

Despite the prominence of gestural aesthetics within early nineteenth-century French thought and indeed the rhetorical similarities between Berlioz’s l’Art du chef d’orchestre and the works of Sicard and l’Epée, they were not by any means devoid of Revolutionary politics. Amongst the various philosophical ideals of Romantic France was a belief in a hierarchical and ordered society, an order that found its strength in maintaining bi-polarities. As l’Epeé’s work was primarily focused on the education of the handicapped, the `others’ mentioned earlier, it was accepted in principal but not so much in practice; deafness was still seen as a pathological condition that put the deaf in a lower strata of society. Thus, the need for a gestural language or method of communicating, whilst seen as often necessary, was always seen as a substitute for spoken communication.⁷⁸ Similarly too, I argue, the French musical establishments, in an equivalent strive to maintain masculine order and hierarchy in politically uncertain times, continued to favour the old-fashioned violin-bow direction to the new baton conductor, long after many other countries had gone a long way in changing.

This desire for stability also manifest itself in a strong disapproval of ambiguity, be it ambiguity in status, gender, politics, meaning and so on. l’Epée’s system was full of polymeaning signs, making it a blessing for Romantic art and a curse for a political society: l’Epée described how the same sign – a cupping of the right hand at the hairline – stood for hairstyle, the feminine gender, and woman. The sign was thus always contingent: metaphorical or metonymic, depending on context, but always polysemic – and gendered, precisely like the style of conducting Berlioz advocated, and precisely the reason the musical institution did not want to adopt it. As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, gesture and sign came to be understood as both feminine and philosophical, and this posed a challenge to French society.⁷⁹

Deafness and the need to communicate by sign was seen as pathological on what Foucault termed the `medical bipolarity of the normal and the pathological.’<sup>80</sup> This pathologicalisation of deafness that occurred in the early nineteenth century re-posited it as a physical disease instead of a mental condition, and thus brought it inline with a wider collection of conditions that were being re-examined in a physical rather than mental light. This new `medicine of the imagination’, as Francesca Brittan describes, included monomania as seen earlier, and also many typically `gestural’ conditions such as epilepsy, hysteria, convulsions, and tetanus.<sup>81</sup> Hence, the use of sign-language, or in Berlioz’s case expressive gesture, became part of this problematic femininised `other’. Indeed, Brittan has argued that much of Berlioz’s life and composition was inexorably linked to the expanding definition of medicine to `include study of both le moral and le physique‘ – his idée fixes were a function of an particular form of `erotomania’, itself a feminine codified condition, focused around the blurred distinction Berlioz held for Smithson, Ophélie, and Shakespeare.⁸²

Thus, somewhat paradoxically, by the 1830s, the advancement of sign-language had moved away from a search for a fluid, polysemic universal language to a culturally and politically `safe’ formalisation of sign-language as a semantic substitution for spoken language. The `otherness’ of sign-language, its ambiguity and links to an original language, were rendered safe; Sicard’s work, for example, provided a gesture to mean `great’ and then a selection of following gestures to alter its syntactic or grammatical function to `greatness’, or `greater’, and so on. A gesture had one particular meaning, which by virtue of being closely related to normal speech became only a step away from the most exalted human characteristic after free will: spoken language. Berlioz’s move to baton conducting represented the exact opposite shift: from a system of highly formalised, safe, musical direction to a complex aesthetic of gestural semiotics, where meanings lay in the imagination. Yet both were bound together by the formalisation of technique – at no point does Berlioz advocate the denial or abandonment of learned gestures. Where the success of l’Epée and Sicard lay in their progressively more clear technical system, Berlioz’s lay in the possibility of ambiguity and fluidity between meanings.

The Genius and The Orchestra

Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906), one of the greatest Russian music critics, wrote on Berlioz’s first visit to Russia in 1847:

What the piano is to Liszt, the orchestra is to Berlioz. Just as Liszt knows all the innermost secrets of the piano, so Berlioz knows the orchestra. He compels it to venture upon new paths, to produce sounds such as have never been heard before. He forces it to bow before his baton and play in such a way as no one has ever been able to play before… Probably no one else has ever delved so deeply into the art of musical performance as he has; no one else has ever experienced the joy he does when `playing the orchestra’ (as he himself puts it). His amazing ear catches every nuance even the most elusive. He never permits a single one to slip by; he brings each one out through the thunder of the entire orchestra. Under Berlioz’s direction the orchestra is like a steed that feels the full power of its rider. Leading it, Berlioz is a veritable general, adored by all his forces, inspiring them by some kind of extraordinary power to accomplish unprecedented feats. Under him, they do things it would have seemed no one on earth could have made them do. It is as though the musicians seated before him were not men but a row of keys; he plays them with his ten fingers, and each one produces just the sound, just the degree of tone that is needed.⁸³

This report by Stasov is characteristic of Berlioz’s inspirational practice in front of an orchestra. His ability to play upon the orchestra, drawing out lines of sound, bringing together disparate musicians into a single unified orchestra, and taking it to new worlds of colour and sound. Most telling is its conflation of the orchestra with the piano, Berlioz with Liszt.

Indeed, it is in Liszt that Berlioz finds a way out of the problematic gender web created by his conducting. This web is not an easy one to untangle, and neither Berlioz nor the French establishments seem to have been able to: Berlioz because he had no need to, and the establishment because it could not see how to. In collapsing the space between the composer and the performer Berlioz unwittingly broke down the gender safety-nets that Habeneck could enjoy. Composition itself, as previously mentioned, had something of an ambiguous gender coding; the fantastic trope that defined much of Berlioz’s work was certainly feminine, with its links to hysteria and madness; the act of conducting, previously thought safely masculine became feminised by Berlioz’s introduction of expressive gestures. Then, in conducting his own works, Berlioz removed the separation of feminine creator and masculine interpreter, becoming both simultaneously – blurring the line where artistic creation stops and damaging the fence that protected others from its feminine contagiousness.

A way out for Berlioz is found in Liszt. As Reeve argues, the two people who greatly influenced Berlioz’s early responses to music were women: Harriet Smithson and Camille Moke (later Marie Pleyel). Berlioz’s love of these women was deeply entangled in his responses to their (feminine) music making and performance gestures.⁸⁴ The question that Reeve posits with regard to Berlioz’s opinions of others is equally applicable to Berlioz himself when conducting: `The pattern that emerges from these events is hardly encouraging for performers, least of all women. A performer appears to have two choices: she can be sincere, assuming and submitting to the emotions she embodies – in which case she risks her sanity and even her life; or she can “fake it,” in which case she is a calculating manipulator and a “prostitute” – and therefore deserves to die. By this logic, she is caught in a double bind that fulfills all of Plato’s worst fears and leaves us wondering: is there a way out?’⁸⁵

Figure 9: The electric baton, by Cham in Charivari (2 December 1855). The caption reads: `M. Berlioz takes advantage of his electric baton to direct an orchestra which will have its members in every part of the world.’

Diderot comes to Berlioz’s rescue: Berlioz came to realise that to make him weep, you must not weep yourself. Berlioz, although engaging in the feminine act of expressive gesture and artistic creation, can explicate himself by not demonstrating his responses to his own music in front of the orchestra. Rather, he came to learn to control his emotions in order to produce better effect from his orchestra. Indeed, it was in Liszt that Berlioz saw the perfect model for this balance of artistic expression. Berlioz sees Liszt as a man who has conquered himself. As Reeve argues, in Berlioz’s eye’s, in short, Moke shows emotion but does not feel it, which makes her both frivolous and false; Liszt feels emotion but doesn’t show it, which makes him noble, spiritual, manly, in control: a “new Oedipus.” Thus Berlioz is in part able to escape the gender ambiguity when on the podium: he has the self mastery of his technique to inspire others without `showing’ himself, and to `feel’ himself without being inexorably linked to showing.

Stasov’s metaphor of the Berlioz treating the orchestra like a keyboard is not uncommon. Berlioz’s formalisation of technique as described in his L’art du chef d’orchestre is an articulation of a wider Romantic trend that eulogised technique itself as a vehicle for reaching some kind of transcendence or spiritual meaning. Whilst Berlioz himself would almost certainly have not subscribed to this position, it is impossible to ignore his treatise within this trend, and the effect it had upon subsequent conductors. Two of Berlioz’s great admirers, Liszt and Schumann, were both exceptional pianists and both used various `practice aids’, dactylions, the chirogymnaste and so on, to further their technique – Schumann so much so that he cut the webbing in his hands and could no longer play. Paganini too was renowned for his divine transcendental technique, a technique so advanced that it began to broach upon the `content’ of a musical performance rather than just being the `form’ that enabled it.<sup>86</sup> Berlioz himself proposed a system of electric wires that would have `Five assistant conductors receive my tempo by electric wires, communicating it at once to the groups under their direction’ as shown in figure 9.⁸⁷ This virtuosity of technique was Parisian almost by conception; as Gautier claimed, Paris was the city `which puts the seal on all reputations and definitely places the golden crown on the heads of young prodigies’.<sup>88</sup> As Samson has argued, it was reconfiguration of the public spaces in France in the early nineteenth century that opened the doors to the Romantic virtuoso, `for which the piano would prove to be the ideal medium.’⁸⁹ Thus accounts that link Berlioz’s virtuosic conducting to the piano are hardly surprising – the piano was the quintessential vehicle for performative display, a mechanical machine conquered by human spirit.

In summary then, the technical and aesthetic developments that Berlioz brought to the art of conducting were great and striking in their breath and daring. He embodied the aesthetics of the fantastic, the grotesque, and the genius that had emerged in Romantic France through writers such as Diderot, Hoffmann, Burke et al., and indeed his own music, in a new expressive, inspired gestural language that stood as the antithesis of the style of musical direction favoured in the establishments. Berlioz coupled this aesthetic shift with a powerful and developed baton technique – a form of gestural precision that was resonant with French advances in sign-language and pantomime. Yet, for reasons of Revolutionary politics and constructions of gender and the artist, the key French establishments generally maintained the old style of violin-bow direction until 1867, despite Berlioz’s great success abroad. Finally, the resolution of the dichotomy between inspired gesture and a virtuosic technique that Berlioz achieved marked the beginning of our conceptions of the modern conductor.

Berlioz arrives in a city. He gathers together musicians of all kinds and calibres. He seldom has more than two or three rehearsals – sometimes, very rarely, four. Then suddenly this group is transformed into an orchestra; it becomes one man, one instrument, and plays as though all of its members were finished artists. Berlioz’s concerts end. He leaves. And everything is as it was before – each man for himself. The mighty spirit that had inspired everyone for a moment is gone.⁹⁰

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---

Footnotes:

¹Seidl was a protege of Richard Wagner and a distinguished conductor. Although too young to see Berlioz in action, he recorded the memories of Cosima Wagner, who was thirty-one when Berlioz died. Quoted in Michael Rose, Berlioz Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 129.

²The Le Carnaval Romain had in fact been performed before at a concert on 19 January 1845 at the Cirque Olympique. Although not the only time Hallé made inaccuracies in his reports, the work would have been new to most of the players, and still shows a remarkable tour de force by the conductor. Ibid., p. 132.

³For a full and interesting account of this evening, see Katherine Kolb Reeve, `Primal Scenes: Smithson, Pleyel, and Liszt in the Eyes of Berlioz’, 19th Century Music, vol. 18, no. 3 (Spring, 1995), pp. 211-23, 211; or, Peter Raby, Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

⁴Hector Berlioz, Memoirs, trans. Ernest Newman and Eleanor Holmes (London: Dover, 1966), p. 464.

⁵Ibid., pp. 97-98, 95.

⁶Reeve, `Primal Scenes’.

⁷See, for example, James R. Knowlson. `The Idea of Gesture as a Universal Language in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 26, no. 4, (1965) pp. 495-508. Descartes and Leibniz had both devoted much time to the philosophical ideas of a universal language; Leibniz claimed that the idea of such a language had `a rational philosophy as clear and unshakeable as arithmetic.’ G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Arien and Daniel Graber (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1989), p. 8. See J. Cohen, `On the Project of a Universal Character’ in Mind LXIII (1954), pp. 49-63, for a history of the idea of a universal language. This interdisciplinary interest that focused on the body is also apparent in other fields, for example, in philosophy much was made of the Descartian associations between the state of the mind and the effect upon one’s health. See Steven Shapin, `Descartes the Doctor: Rationalism and Its Therapies’, The British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 33, no. 2 (June, 2000), pp. 131-154.

⁸This emerging discipline was part of a larger intellectual exercise underway in post-Revolutionary France that saw a wide range of Enlightenment philosophies under criticism – an integral part of which was a conscious examination of the ideas of genius and creativity; as Mary Hurst Schubert suggests, `the very act of artistic creativity was a topic of extensive investigation.’ Wackenroder’s Confessions and Fantasies, ed. Mary Hurst Schubert (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), p. 45. Indeed, Berlioz himself wrote a great deal on the topic in his many writings as a musical critic.

⁹Hector Berlioz, A Travers chants, ed. Leon Guichard (Paris, 1971), p. 26.

¹⁰Charles Hallé, Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé, ed. C. E. Hallé and Marie Hallé (London: Smith, 1896), p. 65, and Richard Wagner, My Life (London: Constable, 1911), p. 234. Wagner was also, however, a bad pianist, but whenever teased about it would retort that at least he was better then Berlioz.

¹¹For a summary of Berlioz’s developments in conducting, see the relevant chapters in Elliott Galkin, The History of Orchestral Conducting: Theory and Practice (New York: Pendragon Press, 1988). Galkin and most other conducting scholars attribute the beginning of the aesthetic of the modern baton conductor to Berlioz and his contemporaries.

¹²See, for example, the many excellent articles in Berlioz Studies, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). None give particular reference to Berlioz as a conductor beyond the historical facts.

¹³François Henri Joseph Castil-Blazé, De l’Opéra en France (Paris: Janet et Cotelle, 1820).

¹⁴Felix Mendelssohn became the first baton conductor of the Gewandhaus in 1835; Louis Spohr, according to legend, introduced the baton in 1820 at a concert with the Philharmonic Society in London; Liszt used a baton when he began conducting 1848. See The Cambridge Companion to Conducting, ed. José Antonio Bowen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 93-114.

¹⁵Galkin, The History of Orchestral Conducting, p. 442.

¹⁶Habeneck was appointed Directeur General de la Musique of the Opéra National in 1821, and Chef d’orchestre of the Orchestre de la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire which had been formed in 1828, the two most important musical posts in France. Berlioz’s writings are saturated with criticism of Habeneck both musically and for his stolid control over the Parisian musical scene; though, his accounts are at times tempered by some respect and admiration for the conductor. Habeneck, from 1824 until his death, was both violin professor and Inspecteur General of the Conservatoire National de Musique; indeed, he was an outstanding virtuoso violinist and in 1804 received a Premier Prix du Violin – a world apart from Berlioz’s musical training.

¹⁷See Berlioz, Memoirs, p. 410.

¹⁸Chorley wrote of Habeneck that `The minuet[... ] was taken too fast – and still not blithely enough; while the splendid subject in the trio lost all its dignity from the acceleration of time; and the second part of the same movement, all its voluptuous richness from being performed entirely without nuance.’ Galkin, The History of Orchestral Conducting, pp. 477-479.

¹⁹For example, the treatises of Saint-Lambért, Simpson, Quantz, Mozart et al. are all primarily concerned with time-beating patterns; questions of subdivision, deciding a tempo, the meanings of different time signatures, and so on. Michel de Saint Lambért, Les Principes de clavecin contenant une explication exacte de tout ce qui concerne la tablature et le clavier (Paris: C. Ballard, 1702); Christopher Simpson, A Practicall Symposium of Musicke (London: Brome, 1678); Johann Joachim Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flote traversiere zu spielen, ed. Hans Peter Schmitz (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1953); Leopold Mozart, A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, English edition, trans. Editha Knocker (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). Pragmatically too, direction of a performance was either from the keyboard or the principal violinist, using a roll of paper, a violin bow, a wooden scroll, or similar.

²⁰Hector Berlioz, A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration to which is Appended the [sic] Chef d’Orchestre, trans. Mary Clarke (London and New York: Novello, Ewer, 1856), p. 257.

²¹Antoine Coypel, Discours prononcez dans les Conférences de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture (Paris: Jacques Collombat, 1721), p. 167.

²²Yet, even for the French in 1750 the idea of gesture as a universal language was nothing new. Lucian recounted, for example, in the dialogue Of Pantomime, how a Prince of Pontus, when promised a gift by Nero, requested that he should be granted the services of a well-known mime, who could replace the various ineffectual translators that he usually employed when talking with foreign dignitaries. The Works of Lucian of Samosata, trans. by H. W. and F. G. Fowler, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1905) At the turn of the seventeenth century, Giovanni Bonifacio, in l’Arte de’ Cenni, showed the extremely wide range of ideas that could be expressed by the orator’s gestures alone. Giovanni Bonifacio, L’Arte de’ Cenni con la quale formandose favella visibile, si tratta della muta eloquenza, che non è altro che un facondo silentio (Vicenza, 1616) Indeed, it is from Renaissance rhetoric and and practices of oration that the late eighteenth-century French scholars and theorists inherited most of their understanding of gesture. Classical scholars, like Bonifacio and John Bulwar in England, wrote a great amount on the different and correct uses of different physical gestures. Bulwar even went as far as to posit gestural communication above spoken, claiming that gestures were more striking in effect and speedier in execution. John Bulwar, Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand. Composer of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: or the Art of Manuall Rhetoricke etc. (London, 1644). When Enlightenment scholars turned to Plato they found evidence of deaf people communicating by gesture: the Cratylus refers to those significant movements of the head, hand and body that were made by the dumb, and Saint Augustine in De Quantitate Anima spoke of a deaf person who would understand others and express himself by means of gestures. Quoted in Kenneth Hodgson, The Deaf and Their Problems. A Study in Special Education (London: Philosophical Library, 1953), pp. 72-73.

²³Charles Abbé de l’Epée, Institution des Sourds et Muets, par la voie des signes méthodiques; Ouvrage qui contient le Projet d’une Langue Universelle, par l’entremise des Signes naturels, assujettis à une Méthode (Paris: Butard, 1774).

²⁴Alongside Sicard, Jean Massieau (1772-1846) and Laurent Clerc (1785-1869) also made important contributions to the field – both were pupils of l’Epée.

²⁵Richard Wagner, On Conducting (London: Dover Publications, 1989) p. 19.

²⁶Reeve, `Primal Scenes’, pp. 211-23, 211.

²⁷Quoted in Francesca Brittan, `Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography’, 19th Century Music, XXIX/3, pp. 211-239, 216.

²⁸Berlioz, A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, p. 245.

²⁹Hallé, Life and Letters, p. 65.

³⁰Saint-Saëns, 1913. Quoted in Rose, Berlioz Remembered, p. 134.

³¹Diderot: Rameau’s Nephew, D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 96-108.

³²Berlioz, Autobiography, 2 vols, trans. Mary Clarke (London: Macmillan, 1884), pp. 2-241.

³³Quoted in Rose, Berlioz Remembered, p. 130.

³⁴Spontini in a letter to Berlioz, 20 November 1843. Quoted in Rose, Berlioz Remembered, p. 128.

³⁵Reeve, `Primal Scenes’.

³⁶Marguerite in the love scene from Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, for example, sings “Dans mes yeux des pleurs… tout s’efface… je meurs” (Tears cloud my eyes… Everything goes blank … I’m dying”. Reeve, `Primal Scenes’.

³⁷Correspondence générale, vol. I, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris, 1972), p. 83 (18 Feb. 1825).

³⁸Quoted in Reeve, `Primal Scenes’, p. 214.

³⁹Hiller, 1880. Quoted in Rose, Berlioz Remembered, p. 130.

⁴⁰In 1833 he conducted at the Thèâtre-Italien, and he conducted three times at the Salle du Conservatoire in 1835-36. These concerts were the first major step up from his previous conducting at the Church of St. Eustache in 1827.

⁴¹Quoted in Reeve, `Primal Scenes’, p. 214

⁴²Letter to Humbert Ferrand (27 June, 1863), Correspondence générale VI.

⁴³Tancock, Diderot: Rameau’s Nephew, p. 194

⁴⁴Hiller, 1880. Quoted in Rose, Berlioz Remembered, p. 130.

⁴⁵Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. trans. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), p. 174.

⁴⁶Johann Gottfried Herder, `Extract From a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples’ (1773); trans. in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, ed. H. N. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 154-61.

⁴⁷Ibid., pp. 139-50.

⁴⁸Ibid., pp. 102-108.

⁴⁹Ibid., p 309.

⁵⁰German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe ed. Kathleen Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 1.

⁵¹Quoted in Abigail Chantler, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Aesthetics (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), p. 19.

⁵²Friedrich Zelter in a letter to Goethe, 21 June 1829. Quoted in Rose, Berlioz Remembered, p. 35.

⁵³E. T. A. Hoffmann, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana; The Poet and the Composer; Music Criticism ed. David Charlton trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 79-80, 135.

⁵⁴For example, early in his career Berlioz collected and burnt much of his work: the Mass, Beverley, Estelle et Némorin, and the Oratorio – he did a similar thing mid-career by destroying the Resurrexit, the Scène héroïque, much of Les Francs-Juges, and more. He also made a suicide attempt, had frequent marital troubles, and was often borrowing large sums of money. D. Kern Holoman, Berlioz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 82, 150, 344.

⁵⁵Chantler, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Aesthetics, p. 21.

⁵⁶Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 175, 177.

⁵⁷Heinrich Heine 1844, Quoted in Catharina Wurth, `The Musically Sublime: Infinity, Indeterminacy, Irresolvability’ (Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 202.

⁵⁸German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, ed. Wheeler, p. 2.

⁵⁹Wackenroder’s Confessions and Fantasies, pp. 99, 101. Sigmund Freud would, some century later, evaluate both da Vinci and Hoffmann himself in a similar fashion; though, Freud approaches issues of split-personality from a psychological perspective, in both cases attributing elements of inspired genius to suppressed childhood memories. See Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (New York: 1964) and P. G. Aaron and Robert G. Clouse `Freud’s Psychohistory of Leonardo da Vinci: A Matter of Being Right or Left’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 13 no. 1 (Summer, 1982), pp. 1-16.

⁶⁰E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 304.

⁶¹Berlioz, A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, p. 245.

⁶²Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

⁶³Quoted in Wurth, `The Musically Sublime: Infinity, Indeterminacy, Irresolvability’, p. 202. In his Treatise on Instrumentation Berlioz is, for that matter, quite instructive and explicit on how to achieve dramatic effects of the terrible through musical sounds. He suggests, for instance, the use of sponge ends when playing the kettledrum to `produce mysterious, darkly menacing sounds’ – and recommends it for the pianissimo kettledrum-passages in Beethoven’s C minor Symphony (Berlioz, A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, p. 380). Alternatively, he points to the dramatic effect of bells in the orchestra, which in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots creates `that ominous sound which spreads awe and horror’ – and in Berlioz’s own `Songe d’un nuit de Sabbath’, together with the tubas and bassoons, invokes death and damnation in a typically sardonic way. Ibid., p. 385.

⁶⁴Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 55-56.

⁶⁵Ibid., pp. 57, 58.

⁶⁶See Robert Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 47.

⁶⁷For a complete discussion see Sander Gilman, `Zur Physiognomie des Geisteskranken in Geshichte und Praxis, 1800-1900′, Sudhoffs Archiv, 62 (1978), pp. 201-34. The storming of the Bastille in 1789 had worked as a spark to a whole powder-keg of unstoppable disruptions in the political and private spaces. The governing system that took over from the old Ancien Régime looked uncertain and fragile, and indeed, changed several times over the course of the rein’s of Luis XVI, Emperor Napoleon, Louis Philippe and the July Monarchy. Napoleon’s fall and return during The Hundred Days `illustrated the instability of autocratic, patriarchal authority’. See `Romanticism Raises the Dead – Gautier’s La Morte amoureuse (1836)’, Amy Ransom, The Feminine as Fantastic in the Conte Fastastique: Visions of the Other (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). The result of these fifty years of political and social upheaval was frequently manifested in a hopeful clinging to conservatism, a return to Enlightenment rationalism, and a rejection of metaphysical theorisation – chiefly brought about by the Constitutional Monarchy that came to power in July 1830. For the arts, this political climate produced a great shift, in part, from a crisis in paternal, masculine authority that influenced the representation of the feminine as a fantastic threat to both social and individual stability.

⁶⁸Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and Culture in England, 1830-1980 (New York, 1985), and Catherine Clément, Opera or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, 1988).

⁶⁹Denis Diderot, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Geoffrey Bremner (London: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 18

⁷⁰Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 13.

⁷¹Or, as Reeve postulates, he fell in love with some amalgamation of Smithson, Ophelia, and Shakespeare. Reeve, `Primal Scenes’.

⁷²The Cambridge Companion to Conducting, ed. Bowen, p. 139.

⁷³To outline the precise technical developments Berlioz describes in his treatise is unnecessary; one only needs to read the treatise or the excellent chapter in Galkin’s The History of Orchestral Conducting to see the volumes of clearly described physical gestures a conductor must learn to make; suffice to say, it is definitely the first study of baton technique to go into this amount of detail.

⁷⁴Hector Berlioz, Evenings in the Orchestra, trans. and ed. Jacques Barzun (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 324.

⁷⁵F. G. Edwards, `Berlioz in England’, p. 444; quoted in Galkin, The History of Orchestral Conducting, p. 557. Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. Judah A. Joffe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), p. 75. Fouqué, Les Révolutionnaires de la musique, p. 253; quoted in Ibid., p. 557. Though, Berlioz’s technique was by no means infallible, as Rimsky-Korsakov noted when Berlioz was in his later years: `… at a rehearsal of his own piece Berlioz would lose himself and beat three instead of two or vice-versa. The orchestra tried not to look at him and kept on playing, and all would go well. Berlioz, the great conductor of his time, came to us when his faculties were already on the decline, owing to old-age, illness and fatigue. The public did not notice it, the orchestra forgave him. Conducting is a thing shrouded in mystery.’ Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, p. 75.

⁷⁶Interestingly, by the early-nineteenth century the pathologicalisation of deafness had given rise to the beginnings of deaf cultural politics. A new deaf cultural elite looked to evade the stereotypes created by l’Epée by pretending to be semblables – `fellows’ of the hearing. They actually sought to mimic the ideas that preceded speech rather than speech itself. See `The Mimicry of Mimesis’ in Nicholas Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 90-139.

⁷⁷Mirzeoff, Silent Poetry, p. 38.

⁷⁸The education of the poor was one of the ways post-Revolutionary France wanted to break its cycle of poverty. Jean-Baptiste Jauffret, secretary of the Société des Observatuers de l’Homme founded in 1799 to advise the colonialist expeditions of Nicolas Baudin to Australia and Levaillant to Africa and employed by Sicard at the Institute, wrote that `speech is, after reason, the most beautiful prerogative of man … it is above all [speech] that distinguishes man from the crowd of animals which surrounds him.’ Quoted in Mirzeoff, Silent Poetry, p. 68.

⁷⁹Nicholas Mirzoeff, `Body Talk: Deafness, Sign and Visual Language in the Ancien Régime’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 25, no. 4, Special Issue: Art History: New Voices/New Visions (Summer, 1992), pp. 561-585.

⁸⁰See Robert Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 47.

⁸¹Brittan, `Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic’.

⁸²Brittan describes Berlioz’s initial relationship with Smithson thus: `Letters of this period seldom refer to Harriet by name; instead, Berlioz called her Ophélie, a reference to the Shakespearean guise in which he first encountered her. For Berlioz, who had never exchanged a word with Harriet, the tragic heroine of Hamlet was more immediate than the actress herself’. Brittan, `Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic’, pp. 219-220, 216.

⁸³Stasov, 1847. Quoted in Rose, Berlioz Remembered, p. 131.

⁸⁴Berlioz recounts that he fell in love with both women at the moment when they were performing: Smithson on stage as Ophelia, and Moke playing Beethoven on the piano. The parallels between Smithson/Ophelia/Shakespeare and Moke/Beethoven are striking not only in situation but also in Berlioz’s response the the physicality of both occasions.

⁸⁵Reeve, `Primal Scenes’, p. 226

⁸⁶See Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Samson argues that the display of virtuosity often became the meaning of performance itself.

⁸⁷Berlioz, Memoires, p. 370.

⁸⁸Gautier, The Romantic Ballet, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (London, 1932, repr. New York 1980), p. 49.

⁸⁹Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, pp. 72-74, 72.

⁹⁰Stasov, 1847. Quoted in Rose, Berlioz Remembered, p. 131.