6 - ‘Ritter Berlioz’ in Germany

Summary

In his classic study The Orchestra from Beethoven to Berlioz, Adam Carse observes that the ‘enduring strength’ of the symphonic repertoire from the first half of the nineteenth century derived mainly from German symphonists. But to this observation he quickly adds the name of Hector Berlioz, ‘whom Nature, perhaps rather capriciously, decided to make a Frenchman’. In a more recent study, Brian Primmer places the question of musical nationality in a somewhat different light:

Whereas men like Beethoven [and] Schumann were […] salient individuals, able to work within a recognizable but continually developing tradition, those such as Berlioz […] were forced to become solitary egotists. They stood out against the backcloth of conventions which was French artistic life and protested their difference with a vehemence which seems exaggerated from any other point of view. They acted out their Romanticism on the stage of history publicly, whereas their colleagues from across the Rhine experienced it in private.

Robert Schumann, in a more famous aphorism, was more succinct: ‘Tell me where you live, and I will tell you how you compose’. While each of these statements has a certain validity, all oversimplify what in fact is a complex issue – the nature of, and relationship between, German and French styles in the early nineteenth century. German musicians at that time were still trying to come to terms with the impact of Beethoven, whose works cast a long shadow and provoked lively debate.