CREATIVE DEVELOPMENTS OF THE ‘MAL DE L'ISOLEMENT’IN BERLIOZ

Abstract

THE THOUGHT and inner experience of Berlioz, so long masked by the legend he helped to create, are beginning to receive due consideration. But there is a special phenomenon which still deserves closer attention: the mal de l'isolement, as he calls it, or 'sickness of isolation'. This is a crisis point of Romantic sensibility-the familiar amalgam of dreamy melancholy, vague desire, poetic nostalgia, and bursts of energy. More specifically it is a climax of the nebulous, obsessive, generalised state of love which he often designates by a term borrowed from Chateaubriand, the vague des passions or preliminary state of emotion. There is some evidence that the mal de l'isolement provides certain underlying elements of Berlioz's creativity; also that the raw experience itself is often reflected, sometimes consciously, in his music. The most characteristic aspect of this condition is the alternation of exaltation and dejection, felt as dissolution of the self in space, and congelation, or spleen. In this, Berlioz (who called himself a musician three-quarters German) resembles most of all certain German poets and philosophers of an earlier generation: he and Nerval are perhaps the only French Romantics to approach them in the intensity and totality of their experience. Moritz, for instance, speaks of a desire to be absorbed into the universe in order to find a more real existence, intimated by memories of childhood and the conception of a Golden Age. He feels a 'rhythm of expansion and compression', a 'double action-aspiration towards immensity and desire for a withdrawn existence; escape beyond limits which seem like a prison, and vertigo which brings one back within these limits'.' In the case of Moritz and several others, this expansion is sometimes followed not simply by vertigo but by a destructive reaction against an imperfect reality. Berlioz, although his experience is fundamentally the same, also alternates between a desire for an ideal death and the need for an intense life, abhorring the dissolution of the self. It should be said, however, that he notes his impressions without proceeding to metaphysical speculations. The principal extract to be examined is from the Me'moires (chapter 40, I844). It was during his stay in Rome in I83I that Berlioz felt a renewal of his childhood symptoms, which would later increase in intensity, of 'a cruel illness (moral, nervous,