Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics

Translating Classical Visions in Berlioz's Les Troyens EMILY PILLINGER introduction In his seminal AfterBabel, George Steiner points out a parallel between thework of the composer and that of the translator: "As in great translation, so in a great musical setting, something is added to the original text. But thatwhich is added 'was already there.'"1 One of the artists towhom Steiner refers in justifying this claim is theRoman tic composer Hector Berlioz, whose Damnation de Faust Steiner analyzes as both a translation and a musical setting of Goethe's Faust. We find an even more explicit demonstra tion ofmusical adaptation as a form of literary translation in Berlioz's opera Les Troyens, where the composer adopts both a classical text and a classicizing interpretative mode. In Les Troyens, Berlioz stages scenes from Virgil's Aeneid with a keen sense of the challenges faced by an artistwork ing within a tradition; challenges that he as a composer shares with Virgil as a poet. Through his musical representa tion of the prophet Cassandra, inparticular, Berlioz explores the difficulties and triumphs of translation, appropriation, and re-creation that are already a fundamental part of Vir gil's literaryprogram. Music and letters, and acts of translation between the two, were vital to Berlioz's development as a creative artist. One of the reasons why Berlioz has been of interest to scholars outside the world of musicology?and perhaps the very same reason why for over a century he was often sidelined by both musicologists and musicians?is that he was not only a great composer, but he was also a brilliant reader and writer.2 Financial considerations forced him to work as a ARION 18.2 FALL 20I0 66 TRANSLATING CLASSICAL VISIONS journalist and critic formost of his life,and he liked to pres ent his writings as being verymuch at the service of his mu sical career; theywere a tiresome distraction that kept him financially stable enough to pursue his musical ambitions. Nonetheless Berlioz's critical and imaginative writing was no perfunctory sideline. Berlioz was a thoughtful commentator on his own works and on those of others, a man who trans lated music intowords and vice versa with a remarkable fa cility. It is this ambidexterity that led Berlioz to paint the witty portraits of themusical world that dominate his writ ten works, particularly the substantial volume of posthu mously-published memoirs and his hilarious short stories set in the Paris Op?ra: Les Soir?es de Vorchestre, or "Evenings in the Orchestra." It is in the epilogue to Les Soir?es de l'orchestre that Berlioz wrote: La musique, en s associant ? des id?es qu'elle a mille moyens de faire na?tre, augmente Vintensit? de son action de toute la puissance de ce qu'on appelle vulgairement la po?sie; d?j? br?lante elle m?me, en exprimant les passions, elle s'empare de leur flamme; ?t incelante de rayons sonores, elle les d?compose au prisme de l'imagination; elle embrasse ? la fois le r?el et l'id?al; comme l'a dit /.-/. Rousseau, elle fait parler le silence m?me.3 Music, by associating itself with ideas which it has a thousand ways of engendering, increases the intensity of itseffect with all the power ofwhat we commonly call poetry; already blazing in itself, in expressing deep emotions it seizes on their fire;glittering with beams of sound, it breaks them down through the prism of the imagination; itembraces the real and the ideal simultaneously; as J.-J. Rousseau said, itmakes "even silence speak." Berlioz was an insistent philosopher when itcame to analyz ing the relationship between the two languages ofwords and music. Here po?sie?literary poetry?describes music's abil ity to evoke emotions, and musical sound appears to create a kind of speech even from silence. Berlioz's definition of music in terms of a language, with a peculiar ability to sus tain the "real" and the "ideal," offers a striking parallel with EmilyPillinger 67 later theorists of translation, particularly Walter Benjamin, forwhom the act of literal translation releases an ideal reine Sprache, or "pure language."4 Berlioz offers music as an analogue...