Conference Agenda

Hector Berlioz famously disliked the term “aesthetics.” He avoided using it in his criticism, correspondence, and other published writings, and frequently claimed a lack of adherence to broad philosophical systems of aesthetic ideologies. Equally notable as his disdain for this term was his growing indifference to the doctrines of the Catholic Church. And yet he spilled a considerable amount of ink on the subject of sacred music: in the modern era, he wrote, “sacred music was a rare thing.” It was, for Berlioz, a withering flower that was in danger of “completely disappearing.”

On the one hand, Berlioz’s words are unremarkable, given the toll that the Revolution had taken on religious practice and the composition of sacred music; the Revolution has been cited by contemporaneous critics and modern scholars alike as a point of unbridgeable cultural and musical rupture. On the other hand, however, his words are curious; his misgivings toward church doctrine and its roles in the fraught political environment of the early nineteenth century seemingly contradict his vested interest in the subject. Given the often-contrary history of French sacred music during the time, Berlioz found himself neither within official Catholic structures that attempted to mandate stylistic parameters nor part of musical institutions that taught its composition in any particular style. Berlioz was thus free to form an idiosyncratic aesthetic of sacred music that could, with an eye to the past and an ear to the future, revitalize and transform a dying art form. This paper outlines this Berliozian aesthetic of sacred music, the construction of which is useful on two fronts: if its deployment in works such as the Grande messe des morts (1837) blurred timeworn binaries between devotion and drama, or expression and sincerity, it also recontextualizes the historiographical toward Revolutionary rupture. In the aftermath of the Revolution, when Catholic practice was being actively redefined and sacred music found itself in a state of upheaval, this Berliozian aesthetic of sacred sound formed a sense of musical continuity in ways that institutionalized musical and religious practice could not.