Berlioz's “Letters on Russia”

摘要

From November 1855 to April 1856, Berlioz published an account of the “Voyage en Russie” that he had embarked on eight years earlier. It is uncharacteristic of him to have waited so long before putting in print the story of his travels and to have offered the story to a monthly magazine for young women, the Magasin des demoiselles. The five articles that appeared there soon found their way, revised, into three chapters of the Mmoires that Berlioz had been composing since 1848 and that he would bring to completion in 1865. At the time of the first publication of the Russian travels, France was engaged in the Crimean War: a complex affair in which France, allied with Great Britain, opposed and eventually defeated the designs of Russia and Tsar Nicholas I (to whom Berlioz had dedicated the score of the Symphonie fantastique) upon the failing Ottoman Empire. Berlioz, whose son was then serving in the merchant marines, had nothing but kind words for the Russians who had so warmly and richly welcomed him in 1847. He had, therefore, to be persuaded to publish his glowing account in time of war, and felt it necessary to underline his patriotism in his brief communications with the editors of the Magasin des demoiselles. Berlioz's “letters” reveal this little-known encounter with the nascent feminine press, and his apparently adroit handling of the tensions—political and other—that pervaded the artistic landscape of mid-nineteenth-century France.