Balzac and Music

Its Place and Meaning in His Life and Work

Jean-Pierre Barricelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138670402
• eBook ISBN: 9781317208563
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1990, this book was the first comprehensive study of Balzac's relationship to music, blending past scholarship with new perspectives to formulate an inclusive account. It begins by examining the contacts and experiences that shaped the musical side of Balzac's life. These left valuable and lasting impressions which often found their way into his writings, where he recorded a myriad of critical and musicological opinions — assessed primarily in relation to Gambara and Massimilla Doni. These discussions prepare the way for an analysis of Balzac two major musical persuasions: religious music and Beethoven. This book will be of interest to students of literature and music.

PART ONE MUSIC IN BALZAC'S LIFE AND TIME

DOI: 10.4324/9781315617640-2

CHAPTER I THE ENTICEMENT OF SOUND

DOI: 10.4324/9781315617640-3

The Formative Years [1799-1819]

"Here is the state of affairs you inquire about: FINE ARTS. I miss music! . . . "¹ So wrote Balzac at age twenty to his sister from his humble garret room on rue Lesdiguières, near the Arsenal in Paris. The reaction to such a deprivation may not have surprised Laure de Surville, with whom he had shared some musical experiences in and around his native Tours. Because the record of experiences like these is scanty, and because Laure sometimes yielded to the temptation of presenting her brother in the best light by retouching his correspondence here and there, some scholars might be justified in considering his complaint apocryphal.² Yet it remains none too clear what reason she could have had to insert this particular statement without similarly editing subsequent letters, where references to music are too thinly distributed to even suggest a musical temperament, if this was her intention.

If we look back to Balzac's younger years to Touraine, we find little to promote a stimulating awareness of music in him. His father, Bernard-François, a self-satisfied, talkative, joyful liver who had ridden high on the crest of both Revolution and Empire, occupied a position of municipal responsibility and found little time for serious music beyond the superficial requirements of convention. His mother, Anne Charlotte Laure Sallambier, a pious but ill-humored, viciously frugal woman, was beset by imaginary illnesses that benumbed the atmosphere and chilled any display of affection on the part of the four children, especially on that of Honoré. Flanked by the garrulousness of the one and the whining of the other, Balzac grew to regard his childhood as dreadful. Only sporadic instances of anecdotal interest can be salvaged from the otherwise musically barren setting in which he was raised.

The nurse and her gendarme husband who cared for him until the age of four allowed him no playmates and, more inconceivably, no playthings. His companion became his imagination. Little surprise, then, that two years later he delighted in running the bow over the strings of a small, wooden, red violin that someone had purchased for him at a local fair for twenty-five sous. "For hours and hours," wrote his sister, he would "grate" on that instrument, "and his radiant expression showed that he thought he was hearing melodies." If Laure, finally unnerved and much to his amazement, would ask him to stop the "charivari" because "that music would have moved Mouche (our house dog) to howls," he would look at her with his small, black eyes still spellbound by his delicious improvisations and say: "Don't you hear how pretty it is?"³

In another context, young Honoré experienced a different kind of musical sensation. On holidays, he and his sister used to accompany their mother to the cathedral of Saint-Gatien to hear high mass, A unisonous choir and an organ always accompanied the rite. The boy's curiosity quickly became fascination as the echoing sounds floated under the grey, Gothic vaults and heightened the mysteries of the service. However unconscious he may have been of the profound artistic and religious manifestations that surrounded him, his young mind was absorbing its first authentic musical impressions produced by what Bertault has called "the inexplicable phenomenon of spirituality" of holy music born of "the sober and monotonal hymn of the service." The boy endeavored to understand the Holy Office with the aid of "the secret of the magic influences that the chanting of priests and organ melodies possess."⁴ The holy service provides the first clues to reveal whatever early affinity Balzac may have had for music, an affinity evidenced later by the place given to religious music in La Comédie humaine. For it was the spiritual element that was to draw him toward a preference for the "Prayer" from Rossini's Mosé in Egitto, for the organ as an instrument, for operatic tales of Biblical import such as Gambara's story of Mohammed, and for the sense of the superterrestrial in a Beethoven symphony.

But a mysterious shiver at the sound of liturgical chants, which no one noticed, and a toy violin which everyone decried, hardly suggested a musical talent to M. and Mme Balzac. The boarding school of the Oratorian Brothers at Vendôme, where the boy stayed for six years until he was fourteen, with its monastic discipline, gloomy towers, stuffy classrooms, and thrashings, was spiritually incarcerating. As he wrote autobiographically in Louis Lambert, had it not been for the library whose collection he perused with passion and dream, he might well have changed into a brute. Except for singing in the church choir for Sunday services, musical instruction found no place in the curriculum which, among similar items, included the nauseous mensa-mensae-mensam of Latin grammar. A Mozart sonata would have sounded incongruous in that Dickensian setting.

After leaving the Lycée, Balzac spent the next five years in Tours in various notarial studies and employments, neither fruitful nor uplifting to his way of thinking. Nor did he find the respectable legal career his parents envisioned for him tailored to his aspirations. Vendôme had reenforced his need to dream; Father Lefèbvre, his teacher, had remarked that Honoré had "more imagination than judgment."⁵ And dream he did. A brilliant drama, he mused, would go farther in the direction of fame than a thorough legal brief. Music at this time served at best as a diversion. Even so, if his father took him to a concert every now and then, as an autobiographical reference in La Peau de chagrin would indicate, we are not permitted to infer that young Balzac craved the experience. If anything, it afforded him heterogeneous sensations, among which can be listed the crass, mock concerts improvised earlier by his Lycée comrades "in the room of master notary Passez's master clerk Janvier (rue du Temple)." As one of the group recorded, they met "for the purpose of making mad, enraged music (only quadrilles were performed) . . . Balzac and I were the audience."⁶

Yet, diversion notwithstanding, he did ask his parents' permission to study the piano, along with his sisters Laure and Laurence. "Le Songe de Rousseau," a popular ditty by J.-B. Cramer,⁷ held his attention for some time, but his short, awkward fingers never permitted him to progress beyond it. The "Songe" represented his executorial accomplishment, and he retained for it throughout his life a fondness which, although artistically unwarranted, was sentimentally understandable.

Dancing, too, presented difficulties. Despite the lessons of a fine master of the Opéra, Honoré fretted every time he was called upon to execute a step. Self-conscious about his weight, his awkwardnesses prompted the young ladies to smile. After several embarrassing performances, during one of which he tripped and fell,⁸ he not only terminated resolutely his lessons but stopped accompanying his family to dances as well.

Such failures the future novelist could blame on physical nature without too much humiliation. What they related to fundamentally, however, was more serious than he cared to admit: a faulty sense of rhythm. A glance at his generally unmanicured style of writing suffices to illustrate this, not to mention his flaccid attempts at poetry. Théophile Gautier once wrote: "Balzac, we must admit, never possessed the gift of poetry, or at least that of versification; his complex thinking always remained rebellious to rhythm. . . . He was always astonished to see us write verses and derive such pleasure from them."⁹ (Not coincidentally, his instincts were always going to favor the unmetrical chants of liturgy over the metrical, consciously rhythmed lines of symphonies.) For this and other reasons, Balzac decided that it was not through "graces and drawing-room talents"¹⁰ that he would distinguish himself and achieve his aspirations for independence and prominence. The imaginative observer conquers the world better than the tripping participant. In 1819, Balzac left for Paris, something of a literary Rastignac, poor and ingenuous, but ambitious and determined, as he so famously put it, to complete with the pen what Napoleon had begun with the sword.¹¹

First Decade in Paris [1819-1829]

In the light of Balzac's youth, then, "I miss music" comes to signify something less than it promises. Surrounded by the dirty yellow walls of his garret room, what he missed, it seems, was the opportunity for distraction through music, for his friends' maniacal quadrilles at the sound of their own bellows, or for an occasional rendition of "Le Songe de Rousseau." His life was drab. Not that he was unable to tap his inner reserve of humor to counteract the depressing environment. His imaginative mind singularized everything down to the most uninviting particular, so that even the disturbing drafts, against which his imaginary valet "Myself" was powerless, reminded him of a famous flutist of his day: "Myself is lazy, clumsy, unforesighted. His master is hungry and thirsty; sometimes he has neither bread nor water to offer him; he is even incapable of protecting him from the wind which blows through the door and window, like Tulou into his flute, but less agreeably."¹² A desire to make some kind of music himself occupied his mind when he insisted on altering the very architecture of his room to make place for a piano, the same piano that will occupy Raphaël's attention in his own attic quarters (PC). Imagining Tulou was not enough. He wrote to Laure: "I beg to inform you, mademoiselle, that I am economizing in order to have a piano here; when mother and you will come to see me, you will find one. I have taken the measurements: it will fit by pushing back the walls, and if my landlord doesn't want to hear of this little expense, I shall add the money to the acquisition of the piano, and Le Songe de Rousseau will resound in my garret, where a need for dreams is generally felt."¹³ Though nothing more than Cramer's ditty, it was more the dream and the idea of music that interested the budding writer than the composition itself.

And dreams became plans. Looking ahead to his future, Balzac's problem was not how to embark upon a career but how to rocket Into fame. An opera libretto based on Byron's The Corsair was among the various philosophic, dramatic, poetic, novelistic, and also scientific projects he envisioned as a launching pad. During the Restoration, as during the July Monarchy later, librettists rose to enviable prominence as a result of the popularity of the lyric theatre. Balzac too might join the glamorous ranks, but neither in the manner of a de Jouy, whose mediocre libretto La Vestale had to be saved by the musical genius of Spontini after having been rejected by Boieldieu and Cherubini, nor in the "veterinarian"¹⁴ manner of a Castil-Blaze whose pasticcio operas (rearranged dissections from Beethoven, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mozart, Paesiello, Cimarosa, Guglielmi, Salieri, Farinelli, Grétry, Pucitta, Federici, Päer . . .) were merely adaptations of Regnard, Destouches, Collé, and Molière. Although he realized how much less essential good poetry was than a good subject that could be exploited musically with dramatic pathos, his primary interest lay more in the realization of a musical dream than in the royalties. Great as the temptation may have been to see his name fixed on the elegant programs of the Opéra or the Italiens, he did not care for expedients that catered to contemporary taste, and preferred to explore for something worthier and new. As it happened, his idea was too new, or so he thought. And in its novelty, the subject demanded an equally novel musical treatment, more than any contemporary composer could handle properly, so the dream dissipated shortly after hatching. Balzac announced to his sister that he was discarding the project: "I have definitely abandoned my comic opera. I cannot find a composer to suit me; besides, I must not write for current taste, but rather do like the Racines and Corneilles, like them work for posterity. . . . Anyway, the second act was weak, and the first was too brilliant with music. One must think and think in order to think."¹⁵ "Too brilliant with music," added Laure in her commentary; "the character of that man is in those four words; he saw, he heard that opera . . . "¹⁶ Was Gambara in the making as early as this?

His first work, as we know, turned out to be not an opera but a play, Cromwell. So many eyebrows were raised that it had to be buried in his drawer almost immediately. Perhaps at this point his honest determination yielded to unscrupulous ambition, for now he did as a novelist what he had refused to do as a librettist. Balzac's early novels represent a clear acquiescence to the siren of popular taste, to its spectral thrills and historical fetishes, and to the lure of lucrative royalties. For a while, he did not even hesitate before the taboo of plagiarism. Then with pricked conscience he sighed: "My attempts to free myself by the bold stroke of writing novels—and what novels! Oh, Laure, how pitifully have my glorious projects collapsed!"¹⁷ But at least he had not affixed his name to the thrillers, having published them under various pseudonyms.

The necessities of ambition pushed aside musical pursuits, even "Le Songe de Rousseau." But at this point, more than drive he needed encouragement. In 1821 he was fortunate to meet Mme Laure de Berny—"La Dilecta," as he called her for the rest of his life—someone who could give him the affection and the self reliance he had always lacked as a "shy and timid" boy (PC 76) by turning into what Mme de Warens had become for Rousseau. (May we look forward to Madame Firmiani and Le Lys dans la vallée?) She also served to renew his exposure to music. Her grandfather and her father, musicien ordinaire of Louis XVI and private musician of Marie-Antoinette,¹⁸ had both been harpists. Both of her daughters, Emma and Emmanuella, played the piano, one supposedly the harp also, and Laure de Berny herself sang with more than common ability. Sténie took shape during these years and reflects the emotional relationship between the writer and his patroness. The heroine, now Mme de Plancksey, writes to a friend about Job del Ryès' improvisations: "Several people had tears in their eyes, above all my mother and I—I who knew the secret of that harmony, I who was the text, the motive, and the object of those tears of the soul" (St 116). Much of what del Ryès plays in the novel during the musical evening in Tours, including the "Ranz des Suisses," clearly recalls experiences at Mme de Berny's. If Mme de Mortsauf was inspired by her, then even her speaking voice reflects La Dilecta's: "musical, [like] a continuous caress," and the affection she lavished possessed "the most skillful gradations of music" (LV 990, 981). As he wrote later, she was a mother, a friend, a family, a counsel; "she made the writer . . ., she created taste."¹⁹Little wonder that at this time music began to acquire a more sentimental, love-coated dimension. Baldensperger has described these years in his life as a period of "mounting musical awareness,"²⁰ a view which is borne out by the words he used in urging his sister to continue studying the piano: "Don't you have your piano playing to improve? Doesn't music possess the fortunate gift of calming the soul, of soothing it with a refreshing balm and of relieving the ills of life?"²¹ In the spirit of Mme de Berny, Balzac sought to encourage Laure's musical interests.²²

Gradually music, musicians, and musical references creep into his writings (St, VA, Sa, CD, JCF). Stértle's Job del Ryè...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Music in Balzac's Life and Time
• Part Two: Debates, Premises, and Comments
• Part Three: Balzac's Major Persuasions
• Part Four Balzac's Musical Tales and Their Implications
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Outline of the Chapters
• Index