The Hector Berlioz Website - Berlioz in Paris

Berlioz in Paris

A concert in January 1845

This page reproduces a contemporary review of Berlioz’s concert on 19 January 1845, organised and conducted by Berlioz. The concert was held at the Cirque Olympique, also known as the Cirque des Champs Élysées, and was the first of a series of four large-scale concerts he gave there between January and April 1845. The programme included the first performance of the new overture La Tour de Nice, subsequently revised by Berlioz to become the Corsair overture (Berlioz composed La Tour de Nice during his second visit to Nice in 1844).

The text of the review and the accompanying image were scanned from our own copy of the issue of 25 January 1845 of L’Illustration, and are reproduced below together with our English translation of the review.

Here is an English translation of the review:

M. Berlioz is an indefatigable athlete and insatiable conqueror. Hardly has he brought one undertaking to a successful conclusion that he is already dreaming of another; his only way of recovering from the stresses of one battle is to lay the plans for the next one. I would wage that last summer, while conducting the performance at the ‘Great Festival of Industry’ he was already preparing the groundwork for the ‘Great Musical Festival’ which has just taken place.

The distance from the place where our national industries were exhibited last year to the Cirque des Champs Élysées, is in truth very small, just a few steps away: you only need to cross the broad alley. While waiting for the concert hall which some newspapers were advising the local administration to build – but giving advice does not mean having to pay – M. Berlioz could find there a ready-made concert hall, decorated in a sumptuous but tasteful way, whose vast dimensions are eminently suited for the deployment of immense tonal resources in which he delights and glories.

It is certainly the case that the Cirque des Champs Élysées has proved to be far more suitable for music-making than the immense and shapeless shanty where the Industrial Festival was given. No more reentrant angles, no deafening stretches of canvas, but well-proportioned dimensions, a round cupola, under which the harmonic vibrations could expand in an even and regular way… Music was there in its natural environment, and last Sunday’s three hundred and fifty performers had twice as much impact as the nine hundred and fifty of a year ago.

Among all the pieces played in this concert only one was new. It is a piece called Overture of the Tower of Nice, probably because M. Berlioz composed it in that city where he recently made a trip. It is an extremely original composition, full of weird effects and bizarre flights of fancy. It is like a tale by Hoffmann. It plunges you into an indefinable malaise; it torments you like a bad dream, and fills your imagination with strange and terrible images. It must be the case that nowadays this tower is inhabited by hundreds of owls and ospreys, and the surrounding ditches must be filled with snakes and toads. Maybe it served as a lair for brigands or was the fortress of some medieval tyrant. Perhaps some illustrious prisoner, some innocent and persecuted beauty, expired there in the pangs of hunger or under the executioner’s sword. You can imagine and believe everything when you hear these strident violins, croaking oboes, lamenting clarinets, groaning basses and moaning trombones. The Overture of the Tower of Nice is perhaps the strangest and most peculiar composition to have been created by the imagination of a musician.

The Hector Berlioz Website was created by Monir Tayeb and Michel Austin on 18 July 1997; this page created in May 2005.

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