Recent Berlioz studies tend to stress the significance of the French tradition for a balanced understanding of Berlioz's music. Such is necessary because the customary emphasis on purely musical structure inclines to stress the influence of German masters to the neglect of vocal and therefore rhetorical character of this tradition. The present study, through a fresh examination of Berlioz's vocal-orchestral scores, sets forth the various orchestrational patterns and the rationales that lay behind them.

The minor choral works are those exclusive of the well-known choral works. Symphonic movements for chorus are also excluded. Conflicting and incomplete information from the composer himself and from secondary sources were principal research problems. The published letters, the memoirs, and a small number of secondary sources, containing little more than passing references, form the body of the research material beyond the scores themselves. The arrangement is by opus number, with unpublished works inserted chronologically by date of composition. A description of the circumstances surrounding each work' s composition precedes a study of the music within each chapter. The last chapter delineates stylistic characteristics of the minor choral works.

Hector Berlioz's Messe solennelle, his first publicly performed work, was important to his establishment in Paris as a composer. Although he later destroyed the Mass, he reused parts of the Resurrexit movement in three of his later works: Benvenuto Cellini (1836), the Grand messe des morts (1837), and the Te Deum (1849). This study examines the Resurrexit and its subsequent borrowings. In each instance that Berlioz borrowed from the Resurrexit, he extracted large sections and placed them in the context of later works. Each time that borrowing occurred, Berlioz constructed the surrounding music so that portions from the Resurrexit would fit stylistically and a seamlessly into the texture. In each borrowing, he left the melody unaltered, changing harmony and orchestration instead. This pattern of borrowing demonstrates that Berlioz developed his concept of melody early in his career, and that his method of self-borrowing was consistent in each subsequent use of the Resurrexit.

The discussion concentrates on Hector Berlioz's second opera, Les Troyens, which is Berlioz's final large work written between 1855-1858. The study demonstrates how the opera is unified through its drama and music. Les Troyens, a five-act tragic opera that is based on Virgil's Aeneid, is perhaps one of Berlioz's least known major works. The orchestral score had not been published in its entirety until 1969, when a two-volume edition of the opera was published by Bärenreiter in the New Edition of the Complete Works of Hector BerIioz. The first complete recording of Les Troyens, conducted by Colin Davis, was released by Philips records in 1972. These two sources have made an analysis of this important work of the nineteenth century possible. The study includes a survey of the dramatic influences of Virgil and his Aeneid, and the poetry of Shakespeare, in addition to the musical influences of Gluck's operas, the compositions of Lesueur, the symphonies of Beethoven, Weber's opera, Der Freischütz, and the French grand opera style, which all contributed to the opera.

In attempts to take a step towards illustrating Berlioz's musical aesthetic, my dissertation explores his "Critical Study" as his manifesto of the new poetic in music, which uses Beethoven's symphonies as models. First published in 1844, his "Critical Study" is a collection of individual essays on each of Beethoven's nine symphonies - the most widely known version of these essays originally published in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris in 1837-8. This collection of essays derives from a reworking of Berlioz's earliest articles on Beethoven (1829-37), notably his reviews of a new concert series at the Societe des concerts du Conservatoire that premiered Beethoven's symphonies in Paris. Almost ten years in the making, Berlioz's "Critical Study" represents the pinnacle of his writings on Beethoven. Here he promotes Beethoven's "romantic" symphonies as models of "poetic" forms, within the context of emerging French literary Romanticism. I examined some of the key components in Beethoven's music that most occupy Berlioz as critic and, in turn, how Berlioz as composer develops these key components in his own contribution to the symphonic genre - his Romeo et Juliette (1839), composed at the peak of his Beethoven study. Ultimately, I hope to have demonstrated that the subtle mixture of the musical, the poetic, the critical pedagogical, and the cultural that intersect in Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette exemplifies the same aesthetic of the poetic that he promotes in Beethoven's symphonies. / Graduate

In this study the choral-orchestral compositions produced by Hector Berlioz are examined in detail for characteristics of musical form, textual setting, and methods of scoring for chorus and orchestra. Reasons for the preponderance of the choral-orchestral medium in Berlioz' output are examined in two introductory chapters. The initial chapter concerns Berlioz' personal experiences as an observer, conductor, and critic of choral music, while the second is devoted to Parisian customs in regard to the choral-orchestral medium during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Included in the historical chapter is a discussion of the haute-contre (high tenor or countertenor) voice preferred in French choruses of that period plus a short review of French orchestral practices, operatic choruses, the French Chapel, Parisian concert societies, and the Paris Conservatory. Especially important is the segment on revolutionary musical fetes which fostered grandiose compositions for chorus and instruments of extremely simple structure. Berlioz' sense of form was governed by his Gallic heritage and for this reason many critics have accused him of formlessness, when in fact his compositions invaribly revolve around a succinct formal plan, admirably executed. Berlioz added to the conservative French tradition which favored the strophe and the Rondeau (an unvarying refrain following disparate couplets) a decidedly learned and classical approach to music structuring; unfortunately, this unique combination of academic compositional techniques and Gallic forms has been a source of perplexity for analysts in search of traditional Germanic forms. Surprisingly, Berlioz makes frequent use of such complex compositional devices as augmentation, fugato, canon, pedal point, and even cantus firmus.

This dissertation explores what it is that makes Les nuits d’été such an effective musical composition. This is done by analysing the song cycle according to Terry Eagleton’s four categories of psychoanalytical literary criticism. The death of Berlioz’s mother, with whom he had an unresolved conflict at the time of her death, is proposed as the emotional trigger that led to the composition of these songs. The content and form of the music to which he set them reveals a narrative that closely corresponds to Freud’s description of the Oedipal conflict and its successful resolution. Using the psychoanalytical theories of Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva and others, the subliminal catharsis of Berlioz’s song cycle, in the way that it is transposed to the listener through the mediation of the music, is proposed as the reason why Les nuits d’été is such an effective musical composition. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Musicology)

This dissertation explores what it is that makes Les nuits d’été such an effective musical composition. This is done by analysing the song cycle according to Terry Eagleton’s four categories of psychoanalytical literary criticism. The death of Berlioz’s mother, with whom he had an unresolved conflict at the time of her death, is proposed as the emotional trigger that led to the composition of these songs. The content and form of the music to which he set them reveals a narrative that closely corresponds to Freud’s description of the Oedipal conflict and its successful resolution. Using the psychoanalytical theories of Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva and others, the subliminal catharsis of Berlioz’s song cycle, in the way that it is transposed to the listener through the mediation of the music, is proposed as the reason why Les nuits d’été is such an effective musical composition. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (Musicology)

Traditional scholarship has stated that the serpent and ophicleide (as well as their successor, the tuba) were developed and added to the standard orchestra to add a bass voice to the brass, allowing a tonal compass to match a similar downward expansion in the strings and woodwinds. A closer reading of the earliest scores calling for these instruments reveals a more coloristic purpose, related to timbre as much as to compass. Indeed, the fact that composers rarely wrote for serpent and ophicleide makes two points: it proves them to be inadequate choices as a brass bass, and when they were called for, they had an expressive, often descriptive purpose. Despite his conservative musical education supervised by Carl Friedrich Zelter, the seventeen-year-old Mendelssohn, under the influence of A. B. Marx, used the Corno inglese di basso, an upright version of the serpent, in his Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream to give a more rustic flavor to Bottom's ass-braying. Even when the English bass horn functioned as a bass voice, it was playing in contexts that were descriptive, where it often demonstrated its musical inadequacy. Berlioz's descriptive writing for the serpent and ophicleide are well known. A remarkable feature which Symphonie fantastique shares with works by the other composers is the confidence Berlioz showed in the ophicleide's functional independence by occasionally giving it an arpeggiated figure while the rest of the orchestra sustains the chord. Wagner's writing for the serpent and ophicleide in Rienzi follows the less imaginative conventions of French grand opera. In Der fliegende Holländer the ophicleide, while not used as descriptively as Mendelssohn and Berlioz, nevertheless contributes significantly to Wagner's emerging focus on the inner lives of his characters and expressive commentary on the stage action. Tubists should consider the expressive implications and the unique timbre of these instruments when performing works originally written for the forerunners of the tuba.