Setting the Stage

In the mid-1960s, as Berliozians were preparing to celebrate the centenary of the composer’s death with new editions of his collected musical works and letters and with major exhibitions in London and Paris, the autograph market was flooded by a glut of Berlioz forgeries. The earliest public reference to these came in a letter from Hugh Macdonald, David Cairns, and Alan Tyson that was published in the Musical Times in January 1969:

The London “Times Diary” of 2 January 1969 picked this up and, under the heading “Beware the Berlioz Fakes,” warned readers: “If you found a Berlioz autograph manuscript in your Christmas stocking, [you had] better have rather a careful look at it.”

This warning was timely even if rather too generalized, since almost all the forged items were addressed or inscribed to members of Berlioz’s own family—his father, his uncle Félix Marmion, his sisters Nanci and Adèle, Nanci’s husband Camille and their daughter Mathilde, Adèle’s daughter Joséphine, Berlioz’s first and second wives, and his son Louis. Nonetheless, it was a scandal that needed exposing. And it still does. The purpose of the present article is to recount the affair in detail for the benefit of current and future scholars who might be unaware of it and who thus might base research on forged documents.

In 1992 David Cairns published an article describing the Reboul-Berlioz collection, in which he noted that most of the Berlioz letters in the collection had already been published or were known through photocopies, but that quite a number which the Correspondance générale designates ‘Coll[ection] Reboul’ are no longer there. Some may have been sold, but some were stolen by a one-time friend of the family who for obvious reasons cannot be named here but whose activities, including wholesale forging of Berlioz autographs, will have to be put on record one day.