EXPERIENCING BERLIOZ: A Listener’s Companion
TEXTS and TRANSLATIONS for works discussed in Chapters 1 and 2
French texts and English translations of selected Berlioz songs and choruses are located by title in the links below. This resource is provided in support of discussions of songs and choruses in Chapters 1 and 2 of Experiencing Berlioz: A Listener’s Companion.
Chapter 1 Songs
Les nuits d’été
Bonus
Le roi de Thulé (from La damnation de Faust)
Strophes: premiers transports (from Roméo et Juliette)
Chapter 2 Choruses
Chant guerrier (from Neuf mélodies, later renamed Irlande)
Chanson à boire (from Neuf mélodies, later renamed Irlande)
Scène héroïque: la révolution grecque
Note: At the author’s request, Katherine Kolb reviewed all texts for errors and revised some translations with permission of the original translators. In addition she has provided explanatory notes on the cultural context of several pieces and translated the famous French national anthem, Hymne des Marseillais, for which Berlioz wrote two versions.
All material is used by permission.
The author thanks Katherine Kolb, David Cairns, Hugh Macdonald, Katharine Conley, and David and Jacqueline Sices for their marvelous work. Thanks also to Monir Tayeb and Michel Austin (hberlioz.com) for permission to reprint selected texts in French.
Katherine Kolb is Professor Emerita of Foreign Languages (French and German) at Southeastern Louisiana University. Earlier, she taught in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis and helped found and direct the Kolb-Proust Archive at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana. She has published on Pascal, Balzac, Proust and other French authors but most notably on Berlioz, whose writings and musical poetics were the topic of her PhD dissertation at Yale University in 1978. In 2015 she edited the first English-language anthology of Berlioz’s criticism for Oxford University Press, Berlioz on Music: Selected Criticism 1824-1837, with translations by Samuel R. Rosenberg that she oversaw, as here.