The Episode of the Foundry Workers’ Strike in Hector Berlioz's Opera Benvenuto Cellini

Abstract

Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly's libretto for Hector Berlioz's 1838 opera Benvenuto Cellini contains a work stoppage by the foundry workers who are casting the Italian Renaissance artist's sculpture of Perseus and the slain Medusa. While Cellini describes no such event in his autobiographical Vita, he does recount another story that may have suggested to the librettists their invention of the workers’ strike episode. Contemporary Romantic writers, including Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo, in their theater and verse, treated the themes of the suffering of industrial workers and the insensitivity of industrialists. Barbier published, also in 1838, Lazare, a collection of satiric poems that analyzed the social problems caused by the Industrial Revolution in Britain, above all the exploitation and suffering of the working class. The France of the 1830s saw a notable increase in the pace of industrialization, the formation of the proletariat and the manufacturing capitalist class, and the first laborers’ strikes. It is in this historical and literary context that one can best understand the incorporation of the apocryphal and anachronistic work stoppage episode into the opera libretto.