ABSTRACT
The field of Berlioz studies is changing with the enhanced availability of sources. This chapter asks, with Annegret Fauser, how we might integrate the study of ‘normal works’ within the more publicly familiar ‘canon’; and also how the wealth of Berliozian thinking on music, now being edited in the complete edition of his Critique musicale, might assist in our coming to terms with his creative production. 1 One area that undoubtedly profits from our new critical exposure is that of opéra-comique, even though Kerry Murphy’s 1988 survey already indicated that Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac (1753-1809) and other ancien régime composers ‘represented for Berlioz a type of perfection’, especially in ‘the grace and perennial freshness of their melodies’. 2 The limited subject of song (especially romances) has the advantage of being an especially potent symbol of the stage genre. Romances were from the first designed to be transferred out of opéra-comique and into the home, often via purchased arrangements, thereby leading a double life in the development of secular melody from around 1750. The tradition continued unbroken into the nineteenth century, and Berlioz consequently modelled his earliest-known compositions within the romance tradition. Circulating between an orchestral genre known from theatre works, and the one accompanied by keyboard (or perhaps guitar) appropriate to the home, the romance represents a doubly interesting influence on our composer, and the new edition of his complete song production makes it apposite to attempt an overview of his creative response to romances and to other songs that he knew. 3 4The fields we have for comparison are (i) the pre- Romantic romance tradition; (ii) the composer’s critical and emotional reactions to earlier song as located in opéra-comique; and (iii) the composer’s essays in composition, particularly those bearing a designation ‘Romance’’. In addition, I shall make documentary reference to folk-music associations with songs prior to Berlioz, to round out the way that romances were formerly understood in a cultural sense. Whereas ‘folk-music sources’ are usually separated from the world of other influences, it may be that in principle the two should be better considered as one joint sphere of influence. 4
