Hector Berlioz and the Bears

This image was posted rather humorously at: http://timothyfox.blogspot.com/2007/12/classical-music-and-rock-music.html

I do not know if Hector Berlioz would be added to the list of composers and symphonies that I expect to hear when I am dead. When I die I expect to hear several works of music:

1. "Donnez du Rum a ton Homme" sung by Georges Moustaki



2. "Raghupati" performed by Bhagvan Das



3. Most all of Johan Sebastian Bach's music for unaccompanied instruments (Oppermann will say that I have redeemed myself there)



4. Chanting of the Gyuto Monks



5. Most all music that I have heard that is not irritating, grating or overly repetative.

One may logically add that one should not really expect to hear anything when one is dead, mainly because of the frightful issue of musical and corporeal de-composition.

What is "useful," and I use the term "useful" only in an unconscious and off-handed manner that does no justice to the terms of beauty.... what is useful in Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique is a certain dilectation of men sitting in each other's company, listening to a recorded performance in an hour of leisure. Most importantly the element of the first movement of Symphonie is La Rêverie, or Les Rêveries plural feminine. This has to do with the feminine soul, not with the masculine Le Reve.... and so on. I am afraid this portion has become excessively theoretical and pedantic. The pragmatics of the text have to do with the use of luxury, of excess which is pointed back at the body once again.

Now I am pasting (or one could say "re-posting", cut-and-pasting) in the entry I left on Oppermann's Ayres-in-Theoria web page: http://ayrestheoria.blogspot.com/

The article came concerning the lapsus of reasoning behind my indictment that Oppermann was Hoffmann.

The key connection here is not merely E.T.A. Hoffmann but Hector Berlioz: who's "Symphony Fantastique" bears a lasting relationship to the "Erzhaelung" at least in my imagination.

When I consider the tales and their content: I do not remember a "March aux Supplice" or whatever Berlioz named it. However there is a strong suggestion that Oppermann's status as Hoffmann is as unequivocal as Ayres to Berlioz or Oppermann to Berlioz for that matter. The issue may be adjurred in the ministry of records, or in the ministry (and ministering) of recorded information. Also in the ministration of meta-information.

The real truth of Hector Berlioz will UNDOUBTEDLY carry us once again back to that entirely beloved and execrable (and that is another association to Camus: "Howls of execration") ARCADIAN moment of listening to Berlioz and discussing all manner of Romantic thinking with Oppermann back at Colorado College.This leaves us at best sentimental jackasses, or at worst sentimentally crippled children in the incestuous embrace of the arcadian mother.The point of all this posturing and discussing of German, French, and English Romanticism is that we definitely were feeling screwed over by the enlightenment: "ridden hard and put away wet," by all that technological claptrap (and that is exactly what technology is a "clap-trap"): Romanticism when it came into being: in the 1780's or the 1980's was simply saying we have more than certainly had enough of being sold--- SOLD ---- another bag of goods by "reason."

Romanticism in its own naivete and idiocy at least has the courage not to be either:

a) hopelessly depressed Wichtigteueren, future occupiers of the seats of middle management, with their oppressive mortgages and their obcessive optimistic despair: real "go getters" who have harnessed the cliche of the American Dream to their chariot and are about to be thrown into an abyss.

b) Involved in the denial of this in some manner or other.

Please note the following categories of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique:There are five movements (indictments?), instead of the four movements which were conventional for symphonies at the time:

1. Rêveries - Passions (Dreams - Passions)



2. Un bal (A ball)



3. Scène aux champs (Scene in the country)



4. Marche au supplice (March to the scaffold)



5. Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (Dream of a witches' Sabbath)

It is not exactly ending as a choral mass. This music ends with more or less the orchestration of a black mass... ...well, whatever.I do not think that Oppermann or I were ever seriously Satanists: such Huismanic extremes (La Bas) were entirely too exhausting, and banal, took themselves too literally. Oppermann is too laughing and too strong either to be too much of a "good" christian or (most certainly) to be a good satanist either.

But we did like the revolt. We did like black coffee and imagining such things as a dance of witches. One could say we rather adored the dance of witches. We could not be witches ourselves; this was not our fate or destiny to be this. But delight, well there was much of this: let the things that are "wickedly-wicked" as the wicked witch of the west reign.

Oppermann was no Copellius: I do not ever remember him being the Hoffmannesque twisted dark man who took away father's soul. Rather Oppermann strove at each instant to instill as much soul as his somewhat "brittle" germanic exterior could muster.Of course it is Offenbach who wrote the most commonly observed opera of the "Tales" which is an account of numerous seductions and trickeries by the anima and by one diabolical form or another. It is rather itself a tale of the infernal comedy of being tortured from one set of events to the next. To what effect?The indictment of Oppermann as Hoffmann was hasty and indeed whimsical. However it is because of these fanciful, fitful, and unscientific conditions that the charges remain impugned more deeply in the grain of his soul.

For future reference the opus of which I speak is called: Nachtstücke The contents of which reads:

1. Der Sandmann



2. Ignaz Denner



3. Die Jesuitenkirche in G.



4. Das Sanctus



5. Das öde Haus



6. Das Majorat



7. Das Gelübde



8. Das steinerne Herz

The book can be found at:http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6341Further research must be performed before we can either fully clear or confirm this indictment according to scientific rigor and dependability.

http://www.janbrett.com/newsnotes/berlioz_newsnotes2.htm

This is entirely pathetic but because Oppermann is a lover of bears from the correct distance I thought I would add a tale of nauseating convivial marital nothingness. I can only add the term "joyous despair" to the unfortunately cute information offered here.

Please also visit:

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/aw