Vers une écriture de l’humeur inquiète: le Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie de Berlioz
Towards a Writing of Wandering Mood: On Berlioz’s Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie

Author(s): Aleksandra Wojda
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, French Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: musical travel; literature – music; Romanticism; Berlioz; music-literature studies
Summary/Abstract: The paper is devoted to Hector Berlioz’s Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie (1844), which offers a particularly interesting variant of musical travel writing that emerges in nineteenth-century France. The analysis of the composer’s prose questions specific aspects of Berlioz’s creative imagination and literary poetics that disclose deeper anthropological and aesthetical implications. The representations of alternative, solitary paths of the wandering hero, the alternate syntactic rhythms and variable tempi of the narrative, the constant play with literary conventions appear as different articulations of new dynamics of the moving, “musical” modern identity that emerges through his writing. The palimpsest-like model of the composer’s creation, as well as his transgressive, eccentric deconstruction of topical representations of the visited countries, converge with these aspects of Berlioz’s poetics that seem to be constantly fostered by the dialectic tension between creative energy of the ever moving self and the necessarily well-delineated dimension of the work of art.

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