A longer work today, by one of my favorite composers ever. In fact, I used to consider him my singular favorite composer of all time, and my esteem for his music has not lessened one bit. If I no longer claim him as my definite favorite, it’s because Sergei Rachmaninoff has managed to carve out an equal claim to my heart. That’s how it goes, really, and one need not love anything less in order to love something else more. It doesn’t work that way.
Anyhow, we’re talking about Hector Berlioz.
This work probably isn’t exactly a Christmas work, as it is specifically set after the Birth of Christ. Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ centers on the childhood of Christ, following the events of Joseph and Mary’s flight into Egypt after Herod’s intent to find the Christ child and kill him became known. It’s an important story, though, and Berlioz’s treatment of it is fascinating, both on its own merits and also in the context of Berlioz’s own output.
The work is gorgeous and dramatic, in the best French Romantic way, without sacrificing its overall tone of sacredness. Berlioz was not a religious man in any way, despite his Catholic upbringing. But he did not allow his personal spiritual beliefs to dissuade him in any way from composing sacred music, because some of his earliest and most formative musical memories were the sacred music of the church of his childhood. Late in his life, then, he produced this oratorio (which, in typical Berlioz fashion, he called something else: a “sacred trilogy”, since Berlioz was always one to write what he wanted, traditional formal “requirements” and “rules” be damned). Also in typical Berlioz fashion, he wrote the work for a pretty large company: full orchestra, chorus, organ, and seven vocal soloists.
But something interesting happens here: for all those forces Berlioz puts on the stage, L’enfance du Christ is surprisingly tender, lyrical, and intimate. Anyone coming to this work expecting the kinds of pyrotechnics Berlioz could sometimes bring to bear will be nonplused by this work. Berlioz is always seen as a Romantic given to high degrees of excess, but in all of his work he strived for proportion and rarely pursued the fireworks for their own sake; people coming to his Requiem because they dig the idea of the brass bands placed at the ordinal compass points in the church will be surprised to learn that that moment comes fairly early in the piece, doesn’t last very long, and is never repeated.
Most histories of Romantic-era music will play up the contrast between the Brahmsian and the Wagnerian approaches (while allowing the Italian operatic approach to develop on its own from Bellini to Verdi to Puccini), with the Russians off to one side pursuing their own stylistic assumptions. All of this left Berlioz to follow his own instincts, creating no “school” of his own. Berlioz’s music stands alone in the 19th century pantheon, very unlike just about everything else that was going on at the time, and he left no direct disciples to carry on his approaches. But somehow this made him even more influential in the end, even if his music had to wait until the mid-20th century to start reaching its full and rightful appreciation.
Here is L’enfance du Christ by Hector Berlioz. The performance below is the classic London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Colin Davis recording (Davis was one of the biggest drivers of the Berlioz resurgence in the latter half of the 1900s). I was going to feature this superb live performance from 2018 (Orchestre Nationale de France/James Conlon), but the video is not embeddable, so go visit it!
