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Although he wrote a Requiem Mass, Te Deum, and other spiritual compositions, the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz has regularly received brickbats from Catholic listeners. In The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), the Dutch-American organist and choirmaster Joseph Otten decried the Berlioz Requiem as a “sacred work, but it does not express any deep personal faith from Berlioz himself… While it strikes terror into the heart of the hearer, it does not inspire devotion.” Otten also deemed the Berlioz Te Deum more “notable for its pomp and splendour than for its prayerfulness”.

Such criticisms were motivated by the grandiose scale of some Berlioz works, but even more so their singularity. As musicologists have noted, Berlioz owes little to past music, nor did he establish a school of followers, so there is little or no music by Catholic composers that sounds quite like his.

The poet Heinrich Heine pinpointed this oddity when he identified in Berlioz’s creations “something primeval, if not antediluvian; they remind me of extinct species of animals, of fabulous kingdoms and sins, of heaped-up impossibilities, of Babylon, of the hanging gardens of Semiramis, of Nineveh…”

For Heine, Berlioz’s gigantic works with “screeching instrumentation” and “little melody” were less evocative of the “Catholic Middle Ages” than the “Assyrio-Babylonian-Egyptian period of architecture”.

Austrian Catholic composer Anton Bruckner was more succinct when he asserted that Berlioz’s choral works were simply “too secular”. Berlioz himself was acutely aware of these objections to his works and even gently mocked them on occasion. In an 1849 review of a rival composer’s Mass, Berlioz observed that a friend had once even claimed that Mozart’s all-too-expressive motet Ave verum corpus “wasn’t Catholic!”

The only way to please such arbiters of liturgical works, Berlioz declared, “was to tend to perform no music at all during services, under the guise of performing Catholic music”.

Yet while Joseph Otten and others were slating the lack of standard Catholic content in Berlioz’s music, his tenderly Pre-Raphaelite oratorio Childhood of Christ (L’Enfance du Christ), based on the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, attained widespread popularity. Atypical in its gentleness, Berlioz’s Childhood of Christ was used around 1900 by the Catholic Church in Belgium and France to accompany magic lantern presentations for religious education, featuring images of the life of Jesus.

Berlioz’s own Catholic education was key to his later compositions. Born in southeastern France, Berlioz made his First Communion at age nine at the Convent of the Ursulines; as he accepted the host, the choir sang a celebratory hymn, which he later described in his Memoirs:

“At the sound of those virginal voices I was overwhelmed with a sudden rush of mystic passionate emotion. A new world of love and feeling was revealed to me, more glorious by far than the heaven of which I had heard so much.’’

Around a decade later, Berlioz finally twigged that the tune intoned on that occasion was adapted from a comic opera, Nina, by Nicolas Dalayrac. This lesson about potential spiritual inspiration from secular material would have a lifelong impact on him.

He attended daily Mass for seven years, and in his Memoirs observed about this early adherence to Church doctrine: “Since [the Church] has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, her creeds are charming. I held them happily for seven years; and, though we quarreled long ago, I still retain the tenderest recollections of that form of religious belief.”

This so-called quarrel was spurred by an ultimatum from his devout mother, who believed that a career in music inevitably led to “discredit in this world and eternal damnation in the next”. Berlioz was ordered to abandon music to be a good Catholic. He refused the maternal edict, and continued to be creatively inspired by Catholicism.

Indeed, Berlioz was surrounded by friends who were ardent Catholics, who wrote about their faith and sponsored his early compositions. Among these was Louis de Carné, founding editor of the Catholic paper Le Correspondant, for which Berlioz wrote several articles. Another was Humbert Ferrand, like de Carné a Catholic and monarchist journalist.

Berlioz admired what he called the “religious respect for truth” of these allies, and in turn they served as a support system during his unusually stressful career. They also helped him express “tenderest recollections” of Catholicism in ostensibly secular works such as Romeo and Juliet (Roméo et Juliette).

In this choral symphony, Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence is accorded a resonant bass voice who, during extensive narration, shifts the responsibility for reconciliation by the warring Montague and Capulet families from the municipal authority of Verona to the cross as symbol and the Catholic Church.

Harold in Italy (Harold en Italie), a symphony in four movements with viola solo, was distantly inspired by Lord Byron’s narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Berlioz interpolated a scene, not in Byron’s original: “The March of the Pilgrims Singing their Evening Prayer”. Byron tended to be sardonic on the topic of religion, but Berlioz was respectful of artistic and cultural traditions of ritual observance.

Acknowledged as a masterful orchestrator even by critics, Berlioz created an effect in “The March of the Pilgrims…” with horns and harp to sound like a sonorous chapel bell tolling. In such unexpected details, Berlioz continued to investigate memories of faith.

His Fantastical Symphony (Symphonie fantastique) includes a dream of a witches’ sabbath, where the sorceresses dance to a parody of the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), the chant sung at Masses for the dead.

Dantesque visions preoccupied Berlioz with imaginings of the Last Judgment. During a stay in Italy, Berlioz planned to write an oratorio, The Last Day of the World, which would never be achieved. According to US composer Edward Cone, Berlioz was also likely influenced by Dante’s Divine Comedy in the structure of his Requiem.

As for the overwhelming vastness of some of his scores, aptly referred to as Michelangelesque, Berlioz acquired an initial notion of massed choirs when visiting London in 1851 and hearing 6,500 children sing in St Paul’s Cathedral. The Victorian fashion for gigantism in musical performance made a lasting impact on the French composer.

Yet even more so, as conductor Pierre Boulez observed in a 1986 essay, Berlioz assembled hundreds of performers to create a “musical congregation”. In his Treatise on Orchestration, Berlioz wrote of the ambition to recreate “shouts, prayers, songs of triumph or lamentation of a people with an expansive soul, an ardent heart”. So, Boulez implied, in post-Revolutionary France, Berlioz was attempting to derive a new community of worshippers through music.

The modern French Catholic composer Henry Barraud concurred, underlining the contemplative silences and restraint in Berlioz’s Requiem, especially given the available forces. Barraud associated the Requiem’s Dies Irae, unlike the parody in the Symphonie fantastique, with the sound of the last trumpet of 1 Corinthians 15 to evoke the appearance of Christ in glory.

Barraud likens Berlioz’s theological depiction of the Day of Wrath to that of Saint Catherine of Genoa who, Barraud notes, defined Judgment Day less about God evaluating humanity than souls judging themselves through their own inability to confront spiritual illumination.

Clearly, Berlioz always sought listeners with an expansive soul as part of the continuing influence of Catholic liturgy and doctrine on his creativity.

Republished with gracious permission from the Catholic Herald (December 2023).

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The featured image is a photograph of Hector Berlioz, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.


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