Celebrations of the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Hector Berlioz's death have resulted in several publications,Footnote ¹ among which the long-awaited critical edition of the composer's Mémoires incontestably constitutes the summit. The most-read text of Berlioz also has been the one most in need of a systematic critical edition. Peter Bloom certainly pays tribute to Pierre Citron (whose famous edition, published in 1969 then revised in 1991, includes some fine annotations), as well as to the translations of David Cairns, Hans Scholz (re-edited in 2007 with a fine critical apparatus from Gunther Braam) and Dagmar Kreher (with some interesting notes from Frank Heidlberger).Footnote ² But this first critical edition in the French language is distinguished by its imposing proportions (the 909-page volume includes a magisterial preface of more than 100 pages, and dense annotation occupies about a third of the space throughout the text), and above all by its remarkable editorial quality, which immediately makes it an everyday essential for Berliozians. Peter Bloom, whose scholarship hits the mark on every page, was not daunted by the magnitude of his task. He even had the grace to complete this immense work on a symbolic date: ‘That this edition was projected on the anniversary of his birth [2003] and went to press on the anniversary of his death [2019] is a coincidence that Berlioz would no doubt have savoured’ (p. 8)!

Mémoires, begun by Berlioz in 1848, constitutes less a sequential and continuous account in the form of a vast confession than a selective history of his life, stitched together from partially pre-existing fragments. Peter Bloom speaks of a ‘thoughtful collage of writings from the past and present’, and of a ‘premeditated mosaic of pieces’ (p. 14). This new edition finally allows us to untangle the threads of this complex skein. When following the text of the first printing of the Mémoires (1865), it systematically confronts it with other sources and versions we have, beginning with the account in Berlioz's Musical Journey to Germany and Italy (a foundational source), followed by numerous journal articles (extracts from the Mémoires were published in preview, mainly in the Magasin des demoiselles and in Le Monde illustré), and finally, the autograph manuscript (which is not complete but which includes material absent from the printed edition). This autograph also includes interesting annotations, such as the back of a page from Chapter XX, for example, which contains a long strikethrough note that Peter Bloom proposes to ascribe to Stephen Heller (the German musician thus would be one of the first readers of Berlioz's manuscript). In this edition, a series of variants from these sources follows each chapter. These often are anecdotal, occasionally revealing how Berlioz elaborated on his text. Some are important, like the end of Chapter XXIV, which initially contained the anecdote known as ‘Le Droit de jouer en fa dans une symphonie en ré’, which Berlioz ultimately chose to publish in Les Grotesques de la musique.Footnote ³

The table of contents takes a form that may surprise those acquainted with Mémoires, but which turns out to be extremely instructive. For instance, it adds a welcome editorial numbering for trips to Germany and Russia and for the last chapters of the book (that of the Mémoires being incomplete). In addition, it highlights Berlioz's comings and goings with small editorial additions emphasizing the implicit form of memories: ‘a sort of rondo littéraire … in which the “choruses” in two main tonalities represent the periods spent at home in Dauphiné and in Paris … and in which trips abroad and pilgrimages to Germany, in various other tonalities, form the “verses” or “episodes” of his life’ (p. 17).

Peter Bloom's annotations are on the whole scholarly (we learn a lot), generous (it always renders unto Caesar that which is Caesar's), intelligent (sensitive to Berliozian irony) and elegant (the writing style is readily appreciated). Reference notes always are of exemplary precision, whether it is the identification of citations (there is no shortage of work here, as Berlioz never ceases to cite from memory and paraphrase the Bible, classical culture and the great foreign authors) or that of the different proper names. It should be emphasized in this connection that some of the biographical information – for Alphonse Royer and Anne-Arsène Charton, to only cite two examples – are even more developed than are the entries in the Dictionnaire Berlioz.Footnote ⁴

Beyond these essential elements of elucidation, the content of the annotations is based above all on a systematic confrontation of the Mémoires with all of the other Berliozian writings. If Peter Bloom recalls in his introduction, quoting Jacques Barzun, that it ‘is not clear that a letter is the best source of facts only because it was written in the heat of battle’, comparing the text of the Mémoires with that of the Correspondance, which is abundantly quoted, always proves instructive. More broadly, the comparison of texts regularly reveals contradictory elements, whether these discrepancies are due to Berlioz himself (for example, Chapter IV, concerning the beginnings of his musical instruction at La Côte-Saint-André, differs somewhat from the autobiographical sketch offered to Joseph d'Ortigue in 1844), or if they emanate from a dialogue that Peter Bloom engenders among fascinating external sources, like the Mémoires de Rémusat (Minister of the Interior, sponsor of the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale) or those of Baron Haussmann (cited in a note to counterbalance Cherubini's attitude towards Berlioz; see p. 232).

This cross-comparison of sources and texts makes it possible to make a large number of factual corrections to the text of the Mémoires. Peter Bloom tirelessly notes mistakes made regarding names (as when Berlioz inadvertently mangles the name of the singer Henriette Wüst), dates (the chronology, often blurred, is finally unravelled), and facts (which also, for example, may concern the programmes of certain concerts of Berlioz, and sometimes even their number – the ‘first’ and the ‘second’ concert that Berlioz says he organized at the start of his career turns out to be the ‘second’ and ‘third’). However, this painstaking work never aims to suggest that the Mémoires would be a text removed from reality. On the contrary, Bloom rejects a too ‘Romantic’ reading, one which would accentuate the degree of fictionality of the Berliozian narrative. The deviations from reality pointed out in his annotations are mostly connected to Berlioz's haste or the complexity of his textual mille-feuille, and not to a desire to embellish the real.

Of course, Berlioz's idiosyncratic humour and unique character call for caution, so Peter Bloom tries to put certain statements into perspective. He points to a few simplifications (for instance, the fictionalized way in which Berlioz presents the subject of the Symphonie Fantastique in Chapter XLIV), and he narrows the scope of certain phrases. Berlioz, as is well known, often resorts to stock phrases, which themselves have had a long history. Bloom always shows how more complex reality actually is. The unflattering commentary on Chopin (whom Berlioz criticizes in Chapter LVI for destabilizing the measure and taking too much freedom with the pulse) is thus mitigated later by a welcome note (p. 732), recalling Berlioz's admiration for the Polish composer. Bloom also nuances Berlioz's judgments on Sacchini (Berlioz seems to despise that composer's Oedipus in Chapter XXII of Mémoires while Chapters 3 and 17 of the Traité d'instrumentation praise this opera). But in other cases he highlights the scope of certain ambiguous sentences. For example, in the middle of the Voyage en Russie, Berlioz writes: ‘I have never seen anything in my life as burlesquely fierce as the intolerance of certain idolaters of German nationality’; Peter Bloom underlines this point to counterbalance the famous assertion of Berlioz declaring himself ‘three quarters German’, in a late letter to the Journal des débats (p. 737). By small degrees, proceeding from the core implications of the text, Bloom's annotations thus lead us to reconsider certain received ideas, or at least to rebalance the image of Berlioz somewhat, bringing to him as much humanity as complexity.

Although the question of how much information to provide can be difficult to gauge in a critical edition, the abundance of Peter Bloom's annotations certainly seems warranted. Perhaps the twenty-first-century reader even might need to be reminded that ‘the golden calf’ evoked by Berlioz in Chapter LIX has its source in the biblical text of Exodus (p. 777). And perhaps the student or the music lover would need to be reminded of Paganini's generous gift to Berlioz when the name of the Italian violinist appears in an ambiguous sentence, as Peter Bloom does here so magnificently (p. 778). But one would be ungrateful to ask for more! The annotations are so generous that they regularly give way to real breakthroughs constituting precious historical context (when it dwells on the reception of certain works by Berlioz), to thematic notices (as when the expression ‘formidable pianist’ (p. 144) gives rise to a long and fascinating note on Berlioz's relationships on the piano), or to broad contextualizations (the ‘consultation cabinet for secret melodies’, in Chapter LX, is abundantly illuminated by the light of the contemporary press).

Beyond Berlioz's text, one should not fail to read the notes for themselves, as they also contain reflections of considerable interest. In turn, we begin to reflect on the hapax represented by the word ‘autobiography’ in the text of the Mémoires (Chapter IV). Likewise, we are struck by the fact that the word ‘orchestration’ appears only once in the text. Elsewhere, we are made aware of the literary effect of the poetic implications that the Invocation à la nature provides (the text of which is inserted into the LIV chapter of the Mémoires). Bloom shows how Berlioz seems to savour their use, even though he was critical of this poetic destabilization when he discovered Hernani in 1830. Finally, it must be gratefully acknowledged that the humour of Peter Bloom comes up quite regularly, whether it is to clarify a joke on the violists (p. 683), to point out the quirks of the French language (p. 259), or to be self-deprecating. When in Chapter LI, in the middle of his first trip to Germany, Berlioz cites a letter sent to Mendelssohn, Bloom enriches it with three footnotes (p. 527): ‘With these three little notes at the bottom of the page’, he comments, ‘Berlioz seems to make fun of scholars who add endless notes of this style. (He's not wrong!)’ As this suggests, with Bloom's edition we have editorial annotation in perfect harmony with Berlioz's text.

As yet, nothing has been said about the formal perfection of the whole (the shell on the French word ‘ambiguë’ is the only one evident in this dense volume!), nor the extraordinary Introduction, which is almost a book before the book. Opening with the marine metaphor used by Berlioz to describe his literary enterprise – a long sea voyage – and closing on the famous quote comparing his prose to ‘the gait of a drunken man’, the volume invites us to conceive of the Mémoires as a sort of ‘drunken boat’, if we can evoke here the magnificent poem by Arthur Rimbaud devoted to the visionary force of artistic creation. Above all, it sheds light on the genesis of Berlioz's story, whose complexity and entanglement of sources are deployed in a didactic way, which leads Bloom, for example, to challenge the thesis that the publication of the Mémoires d'outre-tombe of Chateaubriand would have prompted the writing of Berlioz's own Mémoires. The Introduction makes it possible to date the writing of each chapter; it traces the destination of the preserved copies of the 1865 edition, sheds light on the immediate reception of the first publication in 1870, establishes a chronology of the main editions and translations of the Mémoires, and finally delivers substantial clues to the story of their broad reception. Several tables and a very valuable index finish embedding this Berliozian jewel in a magnificent case.