Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
As we listen to this music, we can share the excitement of a young composer at one of his first ventures into writing for the orchestra. As a fledgling 18-year old composer, Berlioz was anxious. So pleased was he when an orchestral musician congratulated him on his overture to Les francs-juges that he wandered home in a musing daze, not looking where he was going, and sprained his ankle. Ever afterwards, Berlioz claimed, when he heard that piece he got a pain in his foot. Others, he wryly added, perhaps got a pain in the head.
That pain might help us notice the originality of this music, which is astonishing for a prentice piece. No excuses need be made for the Francs-juges Overture, and Berlioz included it in his programs throughout his career as a conductor. Some orchestras he encountered found it difficult to play, but with the public it was a success. Like most effective concert pieces, it includes a catchy tune, the main theme of the Allegro, which many will recognise without knowing its source. It was used as the signature-tune for Face to Face, a TV series (in the UK), and recalls a well-known song.
But the title is intriguing. Who are these ‘francs-juges’? Are they ‘the judges of the secret court’ (the usual English translation)? And to what is this the overture? Berlioz’s closest friend at this time was a law student with literary aspirations, Humbert Ferrand, who supplied him with the text of his first opera Lénor, ou les derniers francs-juges. Berlioz completed the opera in 1826, and tried for years to get it performed. But the panel which chose new works at the Paris Opéra rejected it, and although Berlioz continued to revise it he eventually discarded it, re-using parts of the music in later works. In addition to the Overture, which, as Berlioz wrote ‘has been able to hold its own’, six fragments of the opera survive, including the ‘Marche des gardes’, which became the March to the Scaffold in the Symphonie fantastique in 1830.
The gloomy plot is a story of heroism, friendship, virtue in the face of tyranny and oppression. It is set in the Black Forest region of Westphalia, in the late middle ages.
The secret resistance to usurped authority takes place in the terrifying context of the power of the Vehmgericht, the secret tribunals. These have been compared to the Venetian ‘council of ten’ and to various vigilante movements, which take over the enforcing of moral authority when government is weak, but whose secretiveness can conceal sinister motives. These are the ‘francs-juges’ of Ferrand’s libretto – ‘francs’ in the sense of free, or exempt from scrutiny or control. The Gothic horror engendered by these invisible tribunals gave a not unwelcome frisson to the Romantic mind: Sir Walter Scott also deals with them in his Anne of Geierstein (1829).
The secret tribunal, sometimes called ‘the Northern Inquisition’, was made up of free judges who bound themselves by a terrible oath to absolute secrecy – so feared was the tribunal that few dared speak its name out loud. Originating, legend has it, in Charlemagne’s attempts to Christianise the North and punish pagan recalcitrants, it survived as a network of denouncers, spies and executioners, throughout the middle ages in Germany. The francs-juges’ identity was not known, and they recognised each other by secret signs. Once they had marked an accused for death, it became first an individual, and failing that a collective responsibility to carry out the sentence. An accused was summoned to appear before masked judges at a lonely crossroads, by a notice placed on his door by night:
‘We, the secret avengers of the Everlasting One, implacable judges of crimes and defenders of innocence, cite him, three days hence, before the tribunal of God. Appear, appear!’
Victims of the carrying out of the sentence were hung, draped with a willow branch, on the nearest tree. If they had been stabbed, the dagger was left in the wound as a sign that the victim had not been assassinated, executed by a franc-juge.
Some chroniclers claim that at the end of the 14th century, the time in which Berlioz’s opera is set, there were more than 100,000 francs-juges in Germany.
The music of Berlioz’s overture to this operatic scenario is all the more remarkable since he didn’t yet know Beethoven’s overtures. The struggle between opposing emotional forces, found here, and in a more condensed form in Beethoven’s Egmont and Coriolan overtures, has a common background in the overtures to French operas of the Revolutionary period, such as those of Cherubini and Méhul. The romantic colour, however, of the Francs-juges Overture owes most to Weber, whose Der Freischütz had been introduced to Paris in 1824, making Berlioz a passionate enthusiast.
Like most of Berlioz’s overtures, Les francs-juges has a highly developed slow introduction – first questioning, then portentous, leading to a brass theme suggesting the solemnity of judgment (Berlioz was relieved when the trombones in the first performance told him it was playable). Berlioz’s revolutionary approach to instrumental colour is already noticeable in the blending of brass and winds, and their equal importance with the strings. This introduction propels its ideas into a theme for strings, with parts busily imitating each other, which begins the Allegro. Then comes the well-known theme, starting like the Russian song Stenka Rasin: ‘on the Volga’s mighty bosom…’. Berlioz claimed in his Memoirs that this squarely phrased theme in A flat, over a chugging chordal accompaniment, came from a quintet for flute and strings he had composed as a boy and destroyed after its performance. This theme gains in importance as the music proceeds. It is extended to a full statement, combined with the scampering first theme, and developed in a different rhythm in the reprise. It also dominates the later part of the overture, until the return of the brass motif to clinch the argument, in an exciting coda. As in Weber’s Euryanthe and Freischütz Overtures, there is a mysterious central section, which Berlioz suggested is a prayer, for winds punctuated by string gestures, gradually built up with repeated notes and bass drum strokes to the return of the main theme.
This ambitiously and successfully structured overture, completed in 1826, was premiered in the first concert of Berlioz’s orchestral works, at the Paris Conservatoire on May 26, 1828.
First published, 2002