Lille
1838 (25 June) – performance of the "Lacrymosa" from the Requiem, conducted by Habeneck
1846 (June) – a one-week visit, conducting the première of Le Chant des chemins de fer and the "Apotheosis" from the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale
1851 (30 June) – performance of the "Lacrymosa" from the Requiem, conducted by Girard
This page is also available in French.
Among the French cities that Berlioz visited, Lille impressed him most, apart from Paris: "The city of Lille is the most musical city of France".
The first connection with Lille was the performance of the "Lacrymosa" of Berlioz’s Requiem, conducted by Habeneck on 25 June 1838, who subsequently wrote to him of its success. But Berlioz himself was not invited to attend the concert. He describes the event in his Memoirs (chapter 47) thus:
[In 1838] the city of Lille organised its first festival, and Habeneck was engaged to direct the musical part of it. He was prone, in spite of it all, to generous impulses, and he may have wanted to try to get me to forget, if possible, his famous pinch of snuff. He had the idea of suggesting to the committee of the festival, among other pieces for the concert, the Lacrymosa of my Requiem. A Credo from a solemn mass by Cherubini was also included in the programme. Habeneck rehearsed my piece with extraordinary care, and it appears that the performance left nothing to be desired. It also made reportedly a great impression, and in spite of its colossal scale the Lacrymosa was vociferously encored by the public. Some members of the audience were moved to tears. As the Lille committee had not done me the honour of inviting me, I had stayed in Paris. But after the concert, Habeneck, overjoyed at achieving such a success with a work of this difficulty, wrote me a short letter in the following terms:
My dear Berlioz,
I cannot resist the pleasure of telling you that your Lacrymosa was performed flawlessly and had a huge impact.
Yours ever,
Habeneck
LilleThe letter was published in Paris in the Gazette musicale [see Correspondance Générale no. 556]. On his return Habeneck went to see Cherubini to assure him that his Credo had been very well done. "Yes, replied Cherubini dryly, but you did not write to me!" [Footnote by Berlioz: I had warned him that one day my name would be known to him]
In 1846, Berlioz paid an official visit to the city to conduct his especially commissioned cantata, Le Chant des chemins de fer. He stayed in the city for a week and conducted also the "Apotheosis" of his Symphonie funèbre et triomphale.
Berlioz’s cantata Le Chant des chemins de fer was commissioned in June 1846 by the city of Lille for the inauguration of the Paris-Lille railway line. Jules Janin, a close friend and colleague at the Journal des Débats, was commissioned to write the text (available in full elsewhere on this site). At the time Berlioz was working on his dramatic legend La Damnation de Faust, which he had to interrupt in order to write the cantata. In a letter dated 8 June 1846 to August Wilhelm Ambros, Berlioz writes (Correspondance Générale no. 1044):
I am very busy with Faust, but I have just been forced to interrupt my work to write several feuilletons and a cantata which I am due to conduct in Lille for the celebration of the opening of the Northern Railway [Chemin de fer du Nord].
Berlioz wrote the cantata over three nights and a week later, on 14 June, conducted its première in Lille’s Town Hall, located at the time in the former Rihour Palace. He describes the evening thus in a letter of 29 June to his sister Nanci (Correspondance Générale no. 1045; cf. 1044bis [vol. VIII], to Robert Griepenkerl):
I have been running around a little to keep my legs fit. To begin with I have been for a week a resident of Lille, one of the busiest, and certainly the most serenaded – I have had to face four serenades, three of them instrumental and one vocal. The inhabitants of the great square on which I was staying must have found my presence something of a liability. But all in all the apotheosis [the last movement of the Symphony funèbre et triomphale] went well, and the 250 musicians from the army did a proud job. The cantata was sung with uncommon verve and fresh voices which we are unable to find in Paris for our choruses. But while I was in conversation in the room next door with the Dukes of Nemours and Montpensier who had asked for me, first my hat was stolen, then all the music of the cantata, the orchestral score, some of the parts for chorus and a full score. The upshot is that here is a lost work, as I don’t feel the courage to start all over again. That is all I have gained from this dazzling festival which was sponsored by M. Rothschild, for which I was summoned from Paris and for which I have had to spend three nights composing the cantata.
All the same the Mayor of Lille has sent me in the name of the city a very fine gold medal with the inscription: Inauguration of the Northern Railway, the City of Lille to M. Berlioz...
Later, in an article in the Revue et Gazette Musicale of 19 November 1848, Berlioz recounted the commission to write the cantata; he also wrote in detail about the events surrounding the concert on 14 June in his Les Grotesques de la Musique, first published in 1859.
The score of the cantata was in fact recovered a few years later, though the precise circumstances are not clear. A version with piano accompaniment (arranged by Berlioz’s friend Stephen Heller) was published in 1850, though Berlioz never issued the full score in his lifetime (it is now available in the New Berlioz Edition, Volume 12b).
In 1851 the organising committee of the Festival du Nord planned to invite Berlioz to conduct two of his works there in June, as he wrote to his sister Adèle in a letter of 17 March (Correspondance Générale no. 1392). But by the time of the projected concert Berlioz had been sent to England to serve as a member of the commission representing the interests of the French exhibitors of musical instruments at London’s celebrated universal exhibition of 1851. In a letter from London dated 1 June 1851 to his son Louis he mentions he had just received an invitation from the organising committee go to Lille to hear the Lacrymosa of his Requiem performed (Correspondance Générale no. 1415), though in practice he was unable to go. In the event, the Lacrymosa was given on 30 June, under the direction of Girard, and was received with immense applause.
Unless otherwise stated, all the pictures displayed below
have been scanned from 19th- and early 20th-century engravings and postcards in
our own collection. © Monir Tayeb and Michel Austin. All rights of reproduction reserved.
The first page of the autograph score
of Le Chant des chemins de fer
The autograph score of Berlioz’s cantata is in the Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Paris.
Lille Railway Station in the early 20th century
This old postcard is in our own collection.
This engraving is in our own collection.
At the time Berlioz visited Lille, the Town Hall was located in the former Rihour Palace in what is now the Place Rihour (see below). The construction of Rihour Palace was begun in 1453 by Philippe le Bon, the duke of Burgundy, and finished twenty years later by his son Charles le Téméraire. It consisted of four wings around a central courtyard, and on one of the corners there was a chapel with a staircase leading out from the palace. The palace was bought by the city magistrate in 1664 and from that year on it was used as the town hall. It is in this building that Berlioz’s cantata was first performed in 1846 – the only performance in Berlioz’s lifetime. A year later, the rebuilding of the four wings was started in neo-classical style after designs by Charles-César Benvignat. The rebuilding was finished in 1859. The annex with the chapel was not modernised. In 1916 the complex was destroyed by fire, and the current Place Rihour replaced it. A new town hall was built on a different location. The chapel and staircase in late gothic style escaped the fire and they are all that remains of the building that Berlioz knew.
We are most grateful to our friend Pepijn van Doesburg for providing us with the history of Lille’s town hall and his own original photographs of the extant building.
Remains of Rihour Palace
Remains of Rihour Palace
The arch on the right in this photo remains from the neo-classical town hall of 1847-1859.
Place Rihour
Related pages on this site:
Social song and ways of utopia
Berlioz: A Listing of his Musical Works
You can download a rare recording of this cantata here: Le chant des chemins de fer (MP3 version)
The Hector Berlioz Website was created by Monir Tayeb and Michel
Austin on 18 July 1997;
Berlioz in Lille page created on 11 July 2003
and enlarged on 17 January 2004.
© 2003-2008 (unless otherwise stated) Michel Austin and Monir Tayeb for all the pictures and information on this page.
Copyright notice: The texts, photos, images and musical scores on all pages of this site are covered by UK Law and International Law. All rights of publication or reproduction of this material in any form, including Web page use, are reserved. Their use without our explicit permission is illegal.
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