We have been a long time getting over the nineteenth-century misconception of Berlioz as a composer who wrote only for musical forces deployed on the most gigantic scale, designed to pound the listener into stupefied submission through sheer decibel power. But even those who know only such huge showpieces as the Requiem or The Damnation of Faust should recall that he used the entire ensemble most sparingly, for particular climactic effects. A moment’s reflection brings to mind any number of passages in these and other “grandiose” works of Berlioz that make their effect with a small ensemble, even at times with a single instrument or voice intoning an unaccompanied melody. For there can be no doubt that melody is at the heart of Berlioz’s musical conception, and all else—rhythmic vivacity, harmony, orchestral color—follows after.

Berlioz grew up in the country; the first music he heard, and the music he knew best was primarily melodic: folk songs, popular ballads, and airs from óperas comiques. He was not a pianist, so unlike many of his contemporaries, he never conceived his music at the keyboard, which tends to stress the harmonic underpinnings and to develop small motivic ideas into larger melodies. No, Berlioz conceived his melodies pure and whole, as an attempt to capture a particular mood, the expressive quality of a particular text. They are often unusual in their shape and proportion (especially when compared to the German songs or symphonies that we have come to think of as normative). This reflects an utterly different musical vision, not a shadow (as some critics have had it) on the composer’s competence. He considered his melodies a kind of flexible musical prose, rather than the “musical verse” that might be represented by more stereotyped patterns. Listening to Berlioz’s melodies over and over until through familiarity they reveal their inner logic is the best way of entering in to the secret places of his musical thought. And nowhere is the melodic element as overwhelmingly predominant as in the songs.

We know very little about the composition of these six songs, all settings of texts by the composer’s friend Théophile Gautier, other than that Berlioz himself chose the particular poems and added his own titles with the poet’s approval. Though the songs were published together as a set, there is not the slightest thread of plot connecting them; rather they seem to be grouped with one another because all of them deal in some way with the theme of longing—occasionally in an ironic way, more frequently in deadly earnest.

In the original piano version, Berlioz intended the songs to be performed by tenor or mezzo-soprano; when he orchestrated them, he changed the keys of two of them and suggested different voice parts for some of the songs (implying a performance of the set by more than one singer). Still, it has always been most common for a single singer to undertake the entire cycle. “Villanelle” is a fresh spring song of simple contentment. “Le spectre de la rose” is a conventional homage to the loved one: the very rose that lies on her breast is the envy of kings. The sentimental image is presented with considerable passion. “Sur les lagunes,” a threnody for a loved one who has passed away, rocks gently in its 6/8 rhythm, which might well be an emblem for Charon’s boat, ferrying the lost one “on the sea” that comes at the end of life, leaving the poet behind to mourn. “Absence” is the finest song of the set, its simplicity evoking an overpowering loneliness. “Au cimetière (clair de lune)” begins with an accompaniment of the utmost simplicity that becomes more elaborate and shivery as the singer feels a “shade” brushing past (harmonics in the upper strings). “L’île inconnue” is an energetic song of the sea, an offer to take the “young beauty” wherever she wishes to go. But there is an ironic twist when she says that she desires to go to the land “where love lasts forever.” The reply: “That shore is little known.”

The poems themselves are thoroughly conventional in both manner and substance, but Berlioz’s music imparts a degree of feeling that covers a wide range. His orchestra is small—just a handful of woodwinds (counting the horns as part of the woodwind group) with a modest string ensemble. They practically never indulge in the kind of word painting that a Schubert might provide—no galloping horses or waves gently lapping the side of the boat. The instruments provide rhythmic activity, delicately varied colors, and harmonic underpinning, but for the most part they remain secondary to the voice. The entire cycle remains a vibrant monument to the expressive power of melody. —© Steven Ledbetter