In this paper I should like to examine and reflect upon the image of Berlioz in France in the later decades of the nineteenth century, and to offer in broad terms a reply to the following question: What was the status of this romantic composer in the opinion of the musically inclined public at that time, and in the minds of some of the great musicians of the surrounding generations, among them Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, Vincent d’Indy, Paul Dukas, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy? At the outset one may say that, generally speaking, and with the notable exception of his work for the stage, Berlioz’s music—long derided, minimized, and misunderstood— gradually found a place in the symphonic concert repertory. The historical development of the nation after 1870, on the one hand, and the remarkable development of the symphony orchestra, on the other, were factors that were clearly favorable to the dissemination of Berlioz’s oeuvre.

The dissolution of the Second Empire and the Prussian victory over France were deeply felt by a people who had known foreign occupation only fifty years earlier, a people still conscious of the grandeur of the revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic era. The burst of nationalism that followed the Franco-Prussian War immediately underscored the importance of the native French artist: Berlioz, recently crowned with a certain posthumous glory, was thus favored with newfound defenders, becoming as celebrated in death as he had been contested in life.

Composers

Such an auspicious evolution, to which I shall return, stands in marked contrast to the views of French composers of the fin de siècle. Indeed, the flamboyant romanticism of Berlioz, scorned during his career, seemed suddenly relegated to a bygone century: in 1890, the “music of the future,” in the public’s opinion, was clearly Wagner’s, not Berlioz’s. As for the most advanced composers, Debussy, Fauré, and the youthful Ravel, the main compositional issues concerned harmonic refinement, orchestral transparency, and expressive restraint. It is difficult to imagine works more distant from Berliozian splendor than the Requiem (1888) of Fauré, the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (1894) of Debussy, or the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1898) of Ravel.