Relatively early in the composition of Les Troyens Berlioz declared his intention to include a "pas d'alméées with the music and dancing exactly like the Bayadèères' ballet which I saw here sixteen or seventeen years ago." Despite Berlioz's claim that he had "gone into it" and "there is no anachronism," historical evidence would suggest that the presence of Indian dancing girls in Dido's Carthage is actually highly inauthentic and anachronistic. Indeed, Berlioz's immediate inspiration for the ballet in question was not ancient history but, rather, a group of Indian dancers and musicians who had visited Paris in 1838. An investigation of the context of the bayadèères' performances and the reception of the dancers and their music reveals that issues of authenticity and anachronism were a constant preoccupation for their French audiences, most of whom had previously encountered bayadèères only through the exoticizing lens of Western representations. Berlioz's own references to the bayadèères are examined in relation to contemporary reviews and the text of a highly self-reflexive play that was performed as a prologue and that shaped audiences' responses to the bayadèères' performances at the Thééââtre des Variéétéés in Paris. Although Berlioz is generally thought to have abandoned his intention to embody the 1838 bayadèères in Les Troyens, I argue that he actually retained aspects of his original Indian inspiration in the act IV ballet; moreover, an awareness of the impact of the bayadèères' performances on Berlioz and his contemporaries greatly informs our appreciation of the contribution of the act IV ballet to the wider imperial subtext of Les Troyens. If, rather than simply dismissing anachronism, we are willing to embrace it as a concept fundamental to Berlioz's opera, the act IV ballet——often cut in recent productions——can be newly appreciated as occupying a significant role in the historical dialectic of Les Troyens as a whole.

The development and rapid spread of the electric telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century were profoundly entangled with music in ways that are seldom if ever acknowledged. Particular emphasis is often placed on sound recording as enacting what Attali describes as “the moment when everything suddenly changed.” In fact, the telegraph anticipated several key premises of recording by decades. Its language is heard, on the one hand, in the direct imitation of Strauss Jr.'s Telegraphische Depeschen, and on the other, in François Sudre's development of a “universal musical language” to communicate across distance. Works by Berlioz and Georges Kastner reveal how the telegraph fed into conceptions of musical transcendence via Spiritualists and the Aeolian harp. The attendant emphasis on mind over body was extended through the employment by conductors of telegraph technology to control musicians across ever-greater distances. This apparent disembodiment of the telegraph carried threatening implications for those social or ethnic groups aligned with the body, including performers. However, as Marshall McLuhan suggests, electricity was also primarily a “tactile” medium, and sensitivity to the telegraphic signals in art music therefore also entailed a new appreciation of the powerful role of embodied performers. Listening for the sounds of the telegraph in music of the mid-nineteenth century thus both enriches our appreciation of the historicity of these works and offers new perspectives on the negotiations between embodiment and transcendence that continue to underpin this repertoire.

No abstract

Berlioz frequently explored other worlds in his writings, from the imagined exotic enchantments of New Zealand to the rings of Saturn where Beethoven's spirit was said to reside. The settings for his musical works are more conservative, and his adventurousness has instead been located in his mastery of the orchestra, as both orchestrator and conductor. Inge van Rij's book takes a new approach to Berlioz's treatment of the orchestra by exploring the relationship between these two forms of control – the orchestra as abstract sound, and the orchestra as collective labour and instrumental technology. Van Rij reveals that the negotiation between worlds characteristic of Berlioz's writings also plays out in his music: orchestral technology may be concealed or ostentatiously displayed; musical instruments might be industrialised or exoticised; and the orchestral musicians themselves move between being a society of distinctive individuals and being a machine played by Berlioz himself.

In his final years, Berlioz's name became entangled in debates around Wagnerian 'music of the future'; but Berlioz was also engaged with conceptions of the future in a much more literal sense throughout his life. An examination of texts such as Euphonia which treat futuristic settings helps us to identify three main technological tropes by which the future is characterised in Berlioz's writings: the industrialisation of space and time; the discourse of gender; and fears around agency. Applying these tropes to the contemporaneous La damnation de Faust enables a new reading of genre in Berlioz's 'légende dramatique', which is revealed to dramatise the dialectic of technology and gender on a meta-diegetic level. Performances of La damnation de Faust that stage it as opera or as Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk may blind us to the innovative aspects of the work, for these aspects are most visible when it is the orchestral 'machine' that is placed literally centre stage. This new reading of La damnation de Faust through the lens of Euphonia helps us to resituate Berlioz as a musician of the future in a manner that provides an alternative to the more familiar Wagnerian aesthetics.