BONUS: Discussing “La Esmeralda” (1836) with musicologist Dr. Denise Boneau | Episode Transcript
Below is the full transcript of the first bonus episode of “The Hunchcast of Notre Dame,” the world's first podcast about “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (“Notre-Dame de Paris”) by Victor Hugo and its many adaptations.
If you'd like to listen to the full episode, visit Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
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[Leslie] Welcome to "The Hunchcast," where we discuss all things "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." I'm Leslie, and on today's bonus episode, we're sharing our exclusive interview with musicologist Dr. Denise Boneau. Dr. Boneau is the world's leading expert on Louise Bertin, composer of the Hunchback adaptation "La Esmeralda," which was the topic of our previous episode. In the 1980s, Dr. Boneau's dissertation revived academic interest in Louise Bertin, who by that point had faded from public memory. Her passion for Bertin's work has taken her all the way to France to see the first productions of Bertin's operas in nearly 200 years, none of which would have been possible if Dr. Boneau hadn't brought Bertin's work back into public view. We'd like to express our sincerest thanks to Dr. Boneau for generously offering her time and expertise to our podcast. And listener, we hope you enjoy.
[Denise Boneau] My name's Denise Boneau. I was a music major in a liberal arts college, and I wanted to go to grad school for nebulous reasons, just because I was a good student and I felt I wanted to know more in a particular discipline. So I came to the University of Chicago a long time ago and eventually got my PhD.
I knew I wanted to work with 19th century music, which is at least when I was just starting out, which was a little bit more than 40 years ago when I came to Chicago, came to grad school. Not an awful lot of people studied 19th century music. It originally was a field of interest in really old music, like Renaissance music, and then Baroque music, and then Mozart.
And so when I became an adult student, a grad student, there weren't that many people working on 19th century music topics. My professor here, Philip Gossett, was one of the preeminent scholars at that time, still considered probably that, although he's passed away. But he worked on Beethoven and he worked on Verdi, and it was very exciting.
And I am not an opera person. I play the violin. I've played the violin since the age of nine.
I played, I'm not too bad. I was a concert master in college and a concert master a couple of times in grad school as well. And I currently teach violin as well, just to keep going in music a little bit.
When I was in grad school, no matter what courses I was taking, whether it was a Renaissance class or a Baroque class or class on Mozart, I would always write down in my notes if somebody said, now this would be a good topic for a dissertation. And so when I the 19th century class with Philip Gossett, he was full of interesting potential topics, and I wrote them down. And I thought, I had written a paper in college on Schubert, because I just, I love Schubert.
I spent about a year sort of seeking out Schubert topics and doing preliminary research. And then I realized German, French is my, you know, I've learned French since seventh grade and all the way through high school. So it was my language, and German was not.
In college, I tried to learn some German just for reading purposes, because musicologists always have to know German, because a lot of the original musicologists were German. And so they wrote in and so the research is in German and everything. But after I worked on trying to slug through a lot of Schubert articles, I was like, I think I need to not torture myself quite so much.
And I went back and I looked through my 19th century class notes, and I found where Philip Gossett had mentioned this interesting composer, a woman who had written a number of operas that were actually performed back in the 1820s and 30s. And her name was Louise Bertin. And so I was like, aha, because I had written in art history in college, I had written on Mary Cassatt, and I was like the second wave of feminists from, you know, there was like a slightly older generation than me, but I was always very much interested in the accomplishments of women and the unfairness of why, where were the artists?
Where were the women composers? And it turns out they were there. And there were a lot of them.
And we're just finding out about them, like, at least just in the last, probably since 2000, really. So I did a bunch of preliminary research on Louise Bertin and found very little. And it was a lot of it was not pejorative, but not really positive about her music.
There really wasn't much as in the way of primary sources at that time, somebody would have, you know, at that time, there were like little blurbs in a, you know, encyclopedia of women composers, and it would just be really minor information, maybe a paragraph long for a lot of the women who are now recognized as really serious and important composers. Just to back up a little bit, when I was nine, I think, nine or 10, I read a Reader's Digest for kids. But it was abridged, but it was a very, the whole story of Notre Dame de Paris was there.
And I had read it one day when I was sick. And I was just like, read the whole, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't as long as the original. But a lot, all of the action was there, basically, and very well told, in a very interesting way to capture my attentions.
And I remembered at that time that I had one time had a dream as a very small child of being in a belfry. I don't think I had ever been up in a belfry at that time. It was like, probably when I was three or four or five, something like that.
The dream was me standing in the belfry and looking down upon a landscape and not being afraid, being just up there and looking down. And so all these little ding-dongs started going in my head about my connection to this topic. And I was so, the main thing about Louise Bertin, her main claim to fame, even at that point, people were always saying, and yes, she was the only person to write a libretto in collaboration with Victor Hugo.
And Victor Hugo, in fact, never wrote another libretto. And for, you know, that was the mid-1830s, and he died in 1885. He's one of France's greatest heroes.
Every town in France has an avenue, Victor Hugo. He's not just recognized as a poet and a great novelist and a playwright, but also for human rights, he was a great leader. He was the first to condemn capital punishment and speak out really forcefully against people being put to death because you might be wrong, and you can't get them back after they're gone.
I delved into her and after poking around for about a year and coming up with a proposal and everything, I was able to get the permission to go ahead with that as my dissertation topic. And I applied for a Fulbright, and I was able to go to Paris for a whole year. And that's where I did all of my primary research, because I was able to look at the original documents.
I was able to go to the archives and read letters. I was able to go to the Bibliothèque Nationale and look at the manuscripts of the scores that she wrote. There's so much interesting information that you can get just from looking at a score or a handwritten something or other of any kind.
And while I was there, I had a mentor who was a Victor Hugo scholar. He's a literary scholar, but Victor Hugo and music was his main interest. And so he knew as much about Louise Bertin as anybody.
And he was thrilled that somebody was actually a musician, a musicologist who was coming to study the partnership and the whole background of how they came to write together. Who was this upstart, Louise Bertin, that Victor Hugo deigned to write a libretto for and that sort of thing. So my mentor, whose name is Arnaud Laster, is probably one of the preeminent Victor Hugo scholars, even still now today.
And so he had written a lot from the Victor Hugo point of view about Victor Hugo. A lot of Victor Hugo's novels and, well, obviously Les Miserables and "Notre-Dame de Paris," but a lot of the plays were taken over, librettos written by other people for preeminent composers like Verdi, etc. But he himself never wrote another libretto.
So just to introduce you and your listeners to Louise Bertin. Who was Louise Bertin? She was a very interesting person.
The more I found out about her, the more I was like… So she was born in 1805, which meant that she was three years younger than Hugo. And she lived until 1877, so she lived a pretty good long life for the 19th century.
And she was born into a very unusual family who were very prominent in… Well, they owned a newspaper called the Journal des Débats, and that was a very important newspaper for Victor Hugo because early on, I forget, it was in the early, early or mid-1820s, he had just published his first book of poetry, "Odes et Ballades," and this newspaper that Louise's father owned, he received a very favorable review of that book of poetry. And so Hugo wrote to him to thank him for placing the review.
I can't remember who wrote it, but it was one of the literary critics. But it was that newspaper at that time was called the Journal des Débats Littéraires et Politiques, the Journal of Discussion about Literary and the Arts and Politics. So it was politically-based, but also covered all the up-and-coming young writers and composers and poets and superstars like Chopin and Liszt and the sorts of things that those guys were doing.
So Louise was the third child of this man, Bertin l'Aîné, is what he was called. And I have a picture of Monsieur Bertin. It's a very famous portrait by the painter Ingres, I-N-G-R-E-S.
And there's a painting of him in the Louvre, which is… He was born in the 1760s, so he was a young man during the revolution and the whole change of Bonaparte and all the revolutions and stuff that happened around the turn of the century and on into it. This picture of him, it shows Bertin l'Aîné, the father, sitting on a stool.
He's looking very fierce, but that's such a famous portrait. Anybody who studies art history of the 19th century or modern art history from 1800 on, they know that picture. That's Louise's father.
And there are some funny details about him. The reason he's called Bertin l'Aîné is because he was the oldest brother of four boys who all had the name Louis-Francois. So he and his three brothers were all named Louis-Francois Bertin, and they all had nicknames because of that.
So he was Bertin l'Aîné, which means Bertin the Elder. And then his next youngest brother was Bertin de Vaux, and he was also a partner with the newspaper as well, and part owner. And then there were two younger ones who were a little bit more obscure, and one of them completely disappeared, and the other one was not illustrious enough to have had a major career that we would know about today.
So that's why he's called Bertin l'Aîné, because he was the oldest brother.
[Leslie] That's like George Foreman naming all of his sons.
[Denise Boneau] And it must say something about the father, the pride of the father. I can't remember. I think the father's name was Francois.
I don't think it was Louis-Francois, but he wanted to honor the king. So that's why I think he named his kids Louis-Francois after the king and himself. And he was, I believe he was a military man, and so he was not aristocratic or upper-crust or anything at all.
But as a military guy, he managed to get himself into the bourgeoisie, basically. And he gave his kids a really good education, sent them off. They weren't from Paris originally, but he sent them off to get educated in Paris, which is, of course, the best education you could get.
And so Bertin l'Aîné was just a really interesting guy. And he started this newspaper, or he bought a floundering newspaper and turned it into this major thing, which was a force in the political life, probably from the mid, the 18-teens, all the way through to 19th century. At some point, they did a 100-year anniversary book of the history of the Journal des Débats.
And that was actually one of the places that I got a lot of information because it was the other articles in that book were written by people who knew him and who knew Louis Bertin and knew all the people that they knew back in the 1830s. And so that was a very good source. But he was a very well-read, very well-educated person.
And he was one of the early translators into French of the novels of Walter Scott. And so they were really totally interested. This whole family was very, very interested in and following along the early Romantic movement, obviously in Scotland and the UK and as well as Germany.
I should probably, maybe at this point, tell you the names of the four operas that Louis wrote. They were all performed. The second, third, and fourth were all performed at major opera houses in Paris.
The first one was written when she was between 15 and 20. And it was based on a novel by Walter Scott. It was based on Guy Mannering, which I immediately read once I was studying Louis Bertin and found it very interesting.
And I don't know if you've read other stuff besides Victor Hugo, but Walter Scott is a lot of fun and very much in the same vein, very, very wordy, but really brilliant writer, you know. And so obviously, let's see, I said, there were, Louise was the youngest and she was the only daughter and she had two older brothers. The oldest one was named Edouard and he was an artist and he did the travels to Rome and Italy and for landscape painting is mainly what his interest was.
So he was, he was fairly prominent and this was the oldest kid. He was born in 1797. And then the middle child was Armand, who was chip off the old block of his father.
So he was very literary minded and he became, after his father died, he was the one who became the proprietor of the Jeunesse. And he also had, I mean, there were so many changes of government during this period. So it was like, whose side are you on?
Are you, are you a monarchist? Are you, do you want the return of the Ancien Regime? And so it was really one of the things that I'm still, you know, as I read stuff, more and more stuff is becoming clear even after all this time.
But anyway, so her brother Armand at some point served on some artistic commissions in the government, including the oversight of the opera, the opera, Teatro, Teatro Royal de l'Opera. So back to Louise's operas. So the first one was Guy Mannering and she had, she had two teachers who didn't like each other.
And one of them wrote the, basically the textbook on French dramatic music in the 1830s. And he was an associate of Beethoven's. He was obviously, he was a German guy or he might've even been like from Czechoslovakia or something, but, and his name was Reichar and, but he was in Paris for all of this time.
And the other one was Fetis, who was not, he was very well known as well, but he was a little bit more straight laced about things. He was not really a romantic. He was more in the old school of French opera.
So I'm thinking that her real opera teacher, Reichar, the fellow who wrote the book, and then she had her friends and her relatives who were all musically inclined perform that opera in their orangerie, which was basically their patio just outside of Paris. And they invited all sorts of people, including Rossini. And Rossini shows up and is favorably impressed.
Everybody was like, this, she's really got a talent. She's, she's so young and she just wrote this as a teenager. And so somehow or other, and it's not clear who was pulling the strings, but she was able to secure a libretto from Eugène Scribes, who was the librettist of the 19th century in France.
He wrote all the librettos of all the French grand operas and all the opéra comiques that we still know today. Although French grand opera and opera at that time had really fallen out of favor by the late 19th century. It was not, I mean, that's one reason why she was forgotten.
There, you know, I could list off for you a number of operas that, that are still known, but they represent the tip of the iceberg. They were putting on 10 new operas a year at the Opéra Comique. You may have heard of Meyerbeer.
I'm not sure if you'd heard of Aubert, Alevi. These are guys who were writing at this very same time, and they all had their operas, two librettos by Scribes. So she got a libretto for a one-act opera called Le Loup-Guerroux, which means the werewolf.
And it was really funny. I studied it as part of my dissertation, and it was a success. It actually had more performances of Le Loup-Guerroux at the Opéra Comique that year than he did, their teacher.
So it was a reasonable success, and it was fairly popular, and it was published, and scores of it turned up in a lot of provincial archives, libraries, which I wrote letters to. This was way before the internet, so it was like, how do I find a listing of all the archives, all the cities in France where this opera might have been produced? And so I found a whole bunch of them, and so it apparently was produced.
I'm not aware how many were actually produced or whether they just bought the score and then didn't produce it. So that was Le Loup-Guerroux. It was a very funny opera based on the supernatural.
I mean, obviously the werewolf is sort of a supernatural topic, and so it was about people's superstitions is basically the basic theme of it. People believed that there was this strange guy who was a werewolf by night and changed back into a person by day. There was a love interest, and it all turned out great in the end, the way all those Opéra Comiques did.
There were two weddings at the very end and that sort of thing. I guess I would call Guy Mannering also an Opéra Comique, so that she had written these two Opéra Comiques, and this one was, Le Loup-Guerroux was produced at the Opéra Comique, the theater of the Opéra Comique in 1827, which was interesting because I had known that was her second opera, and then it turns out that her third opera was called Fausto, which was based on Goethe's Faust. Essentially, it was the first French opera based on Goethe's Faust.
I think there was one German opera at that time, but she probably wrote the scenario and even the libretto for Fausto. It was produced at the Theater Italien, which was where Rossini was involved with at certain points. He was the director, the artistic director or whatever, and because he'd been there early on, he knew Louis Bertin, he knew the Bertin family.
That opera was produced, was going to be produced in 1830, but ended up having to be put off for a year until 1831. While I was in Paris, I discovered that she had had a publication called The Last Scene of Faust in 1826, so that predates the opera. It occurred to me, and I don't know the answer to this, but did she have the whole opera of Fausto written at that time, or was this just, I think I'll write The Last Scene of Faust and make it really cool and get it published.
Because her parents were newspaper publishers, so I don't really know, but she did end up having Fausto performed, and it has now been revived. It's been staged in Germany, and it was given a concert performance, so just singers on stage with no acting and stuff like that. But that was recorded in 2023, and I was there for that.
That was the first time it had been performed since 1831, and it turned out it was really good. Obviously, people wouldn't have decided to do it if they didn't think that it was worth doing. I also forgot to mention that "Le Loup-Garou," the previous year, 2022, the opera company called Opera Southwest in Albuquerque did a performance of the Loup-Garou, and I translated the libretto for them so that they could have surtitles.
That was really great. I was really so pleased to be included in that and to be able to provide them with the translation of the libretto. So that's the lead-up, Loup-Garou, Fausto, and then Victor Hugo publishes his novel in, what was it, 1830, I think, or 1831.
But he was working on it. A lot of it, as you pointed out in your previous podcast, that he was doing it because he had procrastinated a long time and was doing it under duress. He had become friends with the Bertin family after that Journal had published the very favorable review of his first book of poetry.
He was basically the same age. He was right between Louise and her next oldest brother. They were all young in their 20s, getting married and starting their families and having children.
They were moving. They spent a lot of time at the estate that the Bertins lived at, probably for the most part in the summertime. They spent their winters in Paris.
It's not very far. Once the railroad came in, you could actually hop on the railroad and get to Paris and get to their little town very easily. So they had lots and lots of people like Rossini, Delacroix, the artist, and who did that painting of…
The thing about Esmeralda, La Esmeralda, the opera, is that when they first started it, it was essentially right before the publication of the novel or right after. This was the time the young families were spending time with each other. A lot of time at Les Roches, the estate, which was a beautiful piece of property with a little lake at the bottom and a stream and all sorts of Gothic fake ruined castle towers and things like that.
This was the time of the closest relationship between Hugo and Louise Bertin. They would spend their days, all the writers and painters and musicians would go off to their various portions of the estate during the day. Then they would all come back for dinner.
Then there would be music and poetry reading. By that time, they'd been working since at least 1831 on an opera based on the novel, which wasn't, to my understanding, was not an immediate success. But over the first five years or so, then people just started buying it up and reading it and it became very popular.
By the time the opera came out in 1836, Hugo was lionized as this great author because he'd written this fabulous novel that everybody just fell over backwards reading. It was just in the zeitgeist. The thing is that when it was finally performed in 1836, it has a completely different ending.
Sorry to say.
[Patrick] The fifth act is missing.
[Denise Boneau] The fifth act is missing, but they had to make it end. It ended after the fourth act. The thing is, Hugo early on had written two scenarios.
The first one was in three acts. The second was in five acts, I believe. The thing that they submitted to the administration of the opera was the five-act version.
The five-act version was very close to the novel, which I'm happy to say. They were obviously happily working on it the whole way through and they hadn't really reached any point of contention from anybody who was going to have a say in how the opera was actually going to turn out. Eventually, the censors got a hold of it and said, okay, well, you can't have Claude Frollo as a priest because you can't depict religious on the stage.
He's so debuffed. He was just such a bad guy. They made Hugo and Bertin turn him into a magistrate, I believe.
That takes away a little bit of the flavor of Notre Dame because if he's not a priest, the connection between this magistrate and Notre Dame isn't as clear.
[Leslie] It's never explained how this magistrate has found a lackey in the bell ringer at Notre Dame. If you have nothing to do with Notre Dame, how did you pick this guy?
[Denise Boneau] Why did he work for you? A lot of problems. Non sequitur after non sequitur.
That was one of the things that they had to change as a result of the censors. I believe in his published libretto, which was actually sold at the theater, those words were pret and archdeacon. Hugo had the last laugh in that case.
The problem was with the final act, they started having qualms about how to stage it, basically. In grand opera at that time, you had these grand scenes called tableaus. The tableau was fabulous painting done by the greatest illustrators and painters at the time who also did designing of the costumes and everything like that.
You had these wonderful scenes of medieval Paris. I believe Notre Dame is visible in pretty much all of the tableaus that they had throughout the four acts of the opera as it ended up being. It didn't disappear as a character, essentially, in the opera.
It's still there visually, but they started having qualms about the last act. How are we going to have this set? They weren't being imaginative enough to be able to imagine a scene in the bell tower with Quasimodo taking care of Esmeralda for all that time.
They, very late in the game, sometime in 1835 or 1836, told them that they were going to have to change because they couldn't stage the final act, basically. I think that might have just been covering up for whatever other reasons. They chopped the fifth act off.
It's a goofy ending where they had to change Phoebus's character so that he was actually a heroic tenor arriving just in time to save Esmeralda from the gallows. In his haste as he rode toward saving Esmeralda, he opened the wound that had been brought upon him by Frollo. He gets there just in time and said, "No, she didn't do it."
Then he dies. Then, essentially, she dies because he's dead too. That's the end of the opera, basically, if they don't say what happened to Claude Frollo, which is kind of a cop-out, really.
It just stole a lot of the richness of the symbolism and the personal angst and the romantic passion from the whole opera to suddenly make Phoebus, who was a complete cad, into this heroic guy that anybody who knew the book, which presumably was everybody in Paris at that time, would have said, oh, that's not how I remember it, Andy. The opera was sort of in trouble from the beginning, or not from the beginning, but as soon as the opera administration got a hold of it, they just were, I think, negative about it. In the meantime, Hugo had become kind of controversial because of his play "Le roi s'amuse," which you may know, it eventually turned into Verdi's opera "Rigoletto."
It was suggested that Hugo was making a political statement about the monarchy at the time. He kept getting involved in all of these political backlashes. In essence, that's sort of what happened at the end of "La Esmeralda," which was presented in November of 1836.
It had basically six performances, or maybe you could say six and a third or something, because although it was fairly well regarded by the audiences at first, and a lot of the critics had decent things to say about it, it was one of those cases where back in those days, they would hire a bunch of people to go into the theater and whistle and boo and throw stuff, because if it was somebody who had money to pay these people, and they were an enemy of the author or the composer or whatever, they could essentially create such an uproar that the opera couldn't continue, and then the administration would never bring it back on again because it ended in such a fiasco. It was a riot.
That's what actually happened at the final performance of "La Esmeralda." The bell song that Quasimodo sang, which loses all meaning in this version of the story, it was the most popular piece in the opera. The singers were all top-notch singers.
They were all the top-notch singers in Paris at that time, so that was really good. Each time it was programmed, it was programmed with a ballet in which Mademoiselle Taglioni, who was the preeminent dancer at the time, was going to be sharing the bell. She was very important.
She, it turns out, was the first person to dance en pointe, so she's the first person who stuffed her shoes with a little padding in the toes and then danced on her toes completely. That was thought that it was a good thing to pair the opera and Mademoiselle Taglioni because people would come to see Mademoiselle Taglioni and would stick around for the opera or vice versa. But eventually, it was this great failure of this opera.
A lot of what I wrote about Louise Bertin, I haven't mentioned one thing that was interesting, or the one further thing that was interesting about her is that she was crippled in her legs, apparently. It was very hard for me to figure out, you know, was she, was it a genetic defect that she was born with, or was it an accident that she had, or was it, my theory eventually was that it was polio or something that she had contracted as a preteen or something like that, and she was never, after that, she was not able to walk again. First, she wanted to do painting like her older brother, and then she started writing poetry.
She didn't ever stop writing poetry. She actually published two books of poetry in her midlife that were well regarded, but that was around the time that I'm sure she had been taking piano lessons from her mom from the beginning and then maybe branching out to other musicians. But her mom, there's a portrait of her mother sitting at a keyboard, and so we know that her mom was a musical person, and so she no doubt was Louise's first piano teacher.
Louise clearly was a musical genius, because she was able to just naturally learn as quickly as she did how to write operas at such an early age, and she was not, women were not allowed to be educated at the conservatoire at that time. That's probably how they got Reicha to be her teacher, because he was a teacher, he was an eminent guy at the conservatoire, and they probably said, would you be willing to give Louise private lessons? For a lot of women at that time, the same thing for women artists as well, if you couldn't go to the school and be taught by the major people writing at that time, you were also not surrounded by your peers who would be giving you input and feedback and doing critiques and having you critique their stuff as well.
But I'm sure she attended every opera that was performed there, so she knew what was going on in the field, and she certainly was able to rise to the occasion. So I don't know if you've heard the opera, but there is a recording of it, and it was recorded in a concert performance in 2008, I believe, and I was there for that. It was at Montpellier in the city south of France, not too far from Marseille, and they had this fabulous one performance which was recorded, and that's what's available.
You can get it on CD, it's available on YouTube, and I just recently found there's a YouTube version of it that I hadn't seen before, which has the English subtitles. There's no scenery, not even a view of the stage and the orchestra and the soloist standing on the stage, but at least you follow the story because the English is there if you're not fluent in French. And also it's very difficult because a lot of times they're singing over each other.
A lot of times they will be singing like parallel verses where some of the words match up, but they're singing, Esmeralda's singing her part and Frollo's singing his part, and they're singing on top of each other. So back to Louise again and her disability. Louise was certainly very well educated by her father and her mother and whoever else they brought in to tutor her, but because at least by this time she was not able to walk.
I've read different things. She could just barely walk with crutches across the room or mostly she was in a wheelchair, I believe, and she had attendants who would take her where she needed to go and take care of her. And it didn't stop her from traveling.
She traveled to Switzerland. She probably, I don't know, I know for sure she went to Switzerland. She probably went to Italy and various other places.
And she did like to travel and she had a friend that she traveled with. But so not only was she a woman, but she was incapacitated and her father was the proprietor of a very controversial newspaper. It was, you know, depending on who was in power at the time, they were, for King Louis-Philippe, the constitutional monarchy, which was essentially like the British system, more or less.
The king was still able to be there, but it was run by a parliament, basically. But there were people who really wanted the old kings to come back. And so there was all this turmoil going on at the time.
And so there were many, many people who were against not only the Journal des Débats and the Bertins, but also against Victor Hugo. They were misogynistically against Louise Bertin. And nobody really talked about the fact that she was not able to walk, but it was generally known in society.
And it was not something that was talked about very much. And it was very difficult in, you know, reading people's memoirs to find the one page where they mentioned, oh, we went to the salon with, you know, various people and Louise Bertin was there. And she, from birth, some of them said she has not been able to walk.
And other people said, recently, you know, she has been unable. So it was like, I don't really know the whole story, but she was, for her, most of her grown-up life, if not before, unable to to be mobile in the way that most people are on their feet. So Bertin l'Aîné was also a, he was just a good patron of all the arts.
And he hired Berlioz as a music critic. And Berlioz, of course, in his memoirs and everything you read about him, and he's always complaining about having to write these reviews and blah, blah, blah. It was actually, I believe, an act of generosity on the part of Bertin l'Aîné to give Berlioz an income by having him be a journalist.
And Berlioz was a great writer as well. So it wasn't really a problem. But it was just that most people have said, you know, they've painted Bertin l'Aîné as the bad guy, because he was, he had, he was making Berlioz write all these newspaper articles and go to all the operas and critique them and everything.
And so he got his name out there a little bit more. So that was good for Berlioz. And that's the sort of thing that that Bertin's father did for a lot of people, a lot of the artists and, you know, up-and-coming writers and musicians of the time.
And so, you know, you can't say that the opera failed because she was a woman, and it wasn't any good because she was a woman. Lots of people, I've read many, many, there were all the newspapers, all the arts newspapers and all the daily newspapers wrote reviews of "La Esmeralda." And many of them were quite complimentary about the music.
I think a lot of people had more problem with the libretto, because for Hugo had to change his whole story. I mean, it really took the punch out of that incredibly dramatic story. But anyway, what I have determined as part of my 700-page dissertation, it was that, and what I have come to realize more recently, is that a lot of the people who were not the top composers just disappeared from view after their death.
So there are a lot of male composers who dropped out of sight, especially from around that time, because French Grand Opera became, as Verdi came on the scene, and then you've got Puccini, and you've got the later kinds of opera. That's the sort of stuff that never left the repertoire. Wagner, yes, I wouldn't want to.
And in fact, Wagner, he came to Paris in 1839, I think. So he was actually sort of in the middle of all of this as well. That's where he first wrote and got his early operas.
The influence was the French Grand Opera, basically, that he was seeing in the 1830s. These operas were not really ever studied. I think people didn't know Meyerbeer's "Les Huguenots."
They didn't know Meyerbeer's "Robert le Diable." They didn't know "La Juive" by Halévy, because they were just, once they were out of the repertoire, they were not produced anymore after Verdi became pretty much the popular opera that everybody wanted to hear. There was, of course, Gounod, and Offenbach, and those kinds of guys.
So that's what we know, because those guys were really tops. But if somebody died, and they weren't preeminent, like one of two or three major names, their music was forgotten, even the male writers. Louise wasn't the first person to have an opera produced at the Opéra, or the Opéra Comique.
There were women who had successful runs, you know, all the way back even into the late 18th century. Possibly also even occasionally into like the 17th century, there were really excellent musicians at the court. So what I've noticed recently is that, just to talk about women composers in general, they were all there.
They were just forgotten, because nobody championed their music after they died. And that's been the story for a number of women composers since the 1820s, for sure. People had heard of Louise Bertin, but nobody studied her music.
A woman who wrote under a male, what do you call it, pseudonym, in the 1890s, had actually seen the works that Louise Bertin wrote after Esmeralda. She never had another. She did have some pieces performed publicly.
She wrote some songs, and some choral pieces, and things like that. But Esmeralda was a good opera, and you can go and listen to it now. And it's just, the music is fabulous.
And she had already, she and Hugo had finished the Fifth Act, and had done it that way. And so the truncated version, all the drama that no doubt Louise had written for the Fifth Act, and maybe the Fifth Act is still out there somewhere. It's not at the Opéra.
It wasn't in her papers.
[Leslie] I have a quick question that just came to me. This might circle back to the conversation about Louise's disability, but in my research, Patrick and I listened to the opera, the video with the English subtitles that you had mentioned. Patrick has listened to it a few more times than I have, but we've both listened to it all the way through at least once.
The question I was left with in my research, and maybe you can help me with this, why did Louise Bertin want to adapt "Notre-Dame de Paris?" Is it that she saw herself in Quasimodo and identified with him as a disabled individual? Is there a clear answer there?
[Denise Boneau] I have some interesting quotes that I could probably read to you, because I just bookmarked them. But like I said, they were very, very close friends at that time. Bertrand and Hugo were very close friends.
Louise was like an aunt to Hugo's young children. In fact, it's really cute to see they would correspond, Bertrand and Hugo would correspond with each other through Hugo's little daughter, Leopoldine. Because Louise was very, very humble.
She was totally aware of the great honor that it was to work with a person that she held in the highest esteem of anyone. So that she would humbly write to Leopoldine and say nice things because she was a little kid of eight or nine or whatever. And she would say, could you ask your papa?
I need some verses for the scene, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then there are some, I mean, he would sometimes tell Leopoldine what he wanted done or most of the time he probably sent directly his verses to Louise or delivered them in person or whatever. But that's just such a charming bunch of letters to read.
They're published in a book. And they're actually, I believe, held at the Maison de Victor Hugo in the Place des Vosges in Paris. Because I remember doing some research there and looking at actual letters.
And if you ever go to the Place des Vosges and visit Hugo's house, there are pictures of Louise Bertin in there on the wall. Hugo's wife, Adele, had written a book called "Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie" ("Victor Hugo, Written by a Witness of His Life"). And there are a lot of really interesting things in there.
I don't know if there's, there must be, I don't know if there's an English translation.
[Patrick] I have just the French, but- There is Charles Gilbert, translator of "Les Misérables" did it back in 64, 65.
[Denise Boneau] Oh, awesome. Let's see. When Rossini came to ask Hugo about a libretto after the publication of Notre Dame, Hugo's response was that "he usually worked alone, that in the marriage between poet and musician, the musician was above and the poet was below."
Rossini did not insist, and the relations between Rossini and Victor Hugo remained sour. There was a funny, some funny stuff about that as well. Just funny anecdotes that- Is that the taxi cab story?
Yeah. Yeah. Rossini said, "Call a cab, please, on your way out."
He said, "Don't tell me what to do." Right. And he went out and he deliberately did not call a cab.
And Rossini was sitting there waiting and waiting and waiting. Yeah. That's very funny.
[Patrick] I adore that story.
[Denise Boneau] It's pretty clear that Hugo was agreeing to write the opera with Louise from the very beginning, like as soon as the novel was published, because I'm sure that, you know, the Bertins probably had advanced copies or had read it before it was even published. And in my dissertation, I do talk about my thoughts as to whether Louise might have been an inspiration for Quasimodo. In fact, Hugo loved Bertin as a sister and called her, "I love her like a sister, and she was like an aunt to my children."
And so it's possible that they were already talking about it while he was in process of finishing the novel. And they got to be able to read it early on. And I forget if one of the things that I said early on was that Louise Bertin's opera Fausto, they were obviously, she was in the vanguard of French Romantic movement.
She had obviously, by the age of 21, read Goethe's "Faust." Possibly not in the German, but there was an early, a couple of early translations of Faust into French that she would have been able to read and write her "Fausto" about. But there were a lot of things that were very Faust-like.
There was a Meyerbeer's opera, "Robert le Diable" is very Faustian. And that was performed just right around the time of Louise Bertin's "Fausto". So it must have been known among the people in Paris that the Teatro Italian had accepted her opera and that it was going to be on "Faust."
And this was just after the most popular translation of Faust came out by a guy named Gérard de Nerval. And he's the one that everybody in 19th century music cites as being the inspiration for Berlioz, who wrote La Damnation de Faust. And he also had written very early, earlier than that, he had written "Huit Scènes de Faust," which I think he sort of withdrew and incorporated into his big "Damnation."
There were all these things about the supernatural and these things had just sort of come over from Germany and were being introduced right at this time in the 1820s and 30s in Paris. So there are all these evil characters popping up in opera and plays and things at that time. And so there's, you know, a lot of similarities between Faust and Claude Frollo, for example, the alchemy and the lusting after the young lady and many more points that have similarity.
And that's the sorts of things that you can draw comparisons between. In "Robert le Diable," the Diable turns out to be Robert's father. Robert is the hero, of course.
And his father, it turns out, is this very Mephistopheles type of character. And he's really evil and does a whole bunch of stuff. But there was a lot of really interesting duplicitous stuff having to do with, oh, we can't have a priest lusting after a gypsy Egyptian, as they called her, because that's so immoral.
But in "Robert le Diable," there was a scene in which they are in a graveyard and all these ghosts of nuns come out of the grave and start dancing around. They're like trying to come on to these gentlemen who are visiting this graveyard.
[Patrick] There's that great Degas painting about that scene.
[Denise Boneau] So why in the world did that get put on stage? Was it because it was ladies doing ballet in diaphanous nun costumes and Frollo was a bad man and they didn't want to do… Anyway, this is right about the time Meyerbeer and Berlioz, Hugo apparently felt a need to work with a composer he felt comfortable with personally, because he wasn't going to work with Rossini.
And a lot of those, you never know whether they're apocryphal stories, whether Rossini said, oh, I'd love to write an opera or whether Meyerbeer wanted to write an opera based on the novel. But since they were working on it, and there's evidence from the scenario from 1832 is pretty much the earliest that you can tell that he had already provided Louise Bertin with verses and that they were corresponding about the scenarios. What's going to go into act one, two, and three and that sort of thing.
Hugo apparently felt a need to work with a composer he felt comfortable with personally. Bertin's earnestness and seriousness struck a chord with Hugo, where Rossini's joking nature left him cold. However serious and noble Rossini's work, for example, "Guillaume Tell," Rossini's personality clashed with Hugo's.
And this is essentially what Hugo's wife was saying in that book. And so it's not surprising, given their deep friendship at that time, that, you know, whether it was, you know, Bertin's father putting pressure on Hugo and saying, yeah, Louise would love to write, because she'd already had those two fairly decent successes, where the critics really appreciated the music of Le "Le Loup-Garou" and "Fausto". It wasn't all misogyny and that sort of thing.
But it might have been also because being a woman and being of not as on high a plane as Victor Hugo was, literarily and musically, that he would have more control than if he was working with a major composer of the time. Louise was very, very humble always and was, you know, always flattering Hugo in her correspondence with Leopoldine by saying, your father, you know, may not have the time for me, but if you could ask him about what's going to happen in such and such a scene. I just think that there is a close, a very close connection between Louise Bertin and "Notre-Dame de Paris" and Victor Hugo, because of their friendship at the time and just because of their respect for each other.
Louise was a really unusual person at that time. The women and the families that held salons, Louise Bertin was part of that scene. And so in the memoirs of these various people who we don't even remember anymore, there are some mentions of what an intellect Louise Bertin was, that she wasn't just, you know, a flighty woman or, you know, just somebody pretending to know how to write music.
She was really highly regarded among her peers at that time. And so it's just strange that, I mean, it's not surprising. Opera has always been a very expensive adventure.
And so if an opera falls out of favor and doesn't, you know, nobody's heard of this opera from 100 years ago, no opera company is going to spend the money, because most opera companies are operating in the red a lot anyway, and ticket sales don't come near paying for how expensive it is to produce an opera. Opera companies in the 20th century, even the late 20th century, were not going to say, oh, here's an opera by this really interesting woman. Well, they didn't know she was as interesting as I found out that she was, but why don't we put on "La Esmeralda?"
And even now, I'm not sure that they well, it's been staged. It was staged in Paris. "La Esmeralda" was staged in 2023.
So it's like she's not been completely forgotten, but she is there.
[Leslie] I think that's a good transition into one of the questions we had emailed you. You mentioned that opera companies are often operating in the red, and they may be hesitant to produce operas that were not successful upon their debut. Why, then, do you think there has been a renewed interest in the 21st century in Bertin's work?
[Denise Boneau] Because I think there has been a sort of a renaissance of discovery of women composers who have, from about the time that I was writing my dissertation, there were some encyclopedias of women composers. There was a contemporary of Louise Bertin called Louise Ferenc, and she wrote orchestral music, and she was a pianist, and I believe she was also taught by Reicha. But she was one of the ones that people always mentioned.
And because she wrote things that women were supposed to have written, like songs and piano pieces and things like that, it was thought to be more ladylike, I guess. Even into the 20th century, that was what they were interested in. Nobody was interested in studying Louise Bertin until I came along in the 1980s, which is just crazy to me when it turned out how incredibly interesting a life she had and the people that she knew, and the music turning out to be really, really good.
Probably technology has a lot to do with it as well, just the internet and the availability of information about these lesser known composers, even the men composers. There's a lot of men composers that I've never heard of that I'm hearing on the radio all the time now, and I'm like, oh wow, at least the radio station in Chicago is making a very good effort to play the music of women, which means that it's been recorded, which means that somebody had an interest in it. I think that they didn't have an awful lot of interest in Louise Bertin because she wrote operas, and nobody was really I mean, when I wrote my dissertation, I'm not a pianist.
I'm a violinist, and so it was all in my head. I had to be able to read the score and imagine the combining of all the different lines of music in my head, so there was nothing that when I was writing my dissertation, there was really nothing. I made an edition of the Overture to "Fausto," and my grad school orchestra played it in a concert, so that was like the first Louise Bertin music being performed on this continent, but people were much more interested in the smaller scale stuff, and so a lot of the songs and piano pieces were what got looked at earlier on, and then I just think there's been a really fairly good renaissance of people discovering new music of prior composers.
[Leslie] I'm even struck that you had mentioned that you had first heard Louise's name in a lecture at school. I'm even surprised that your professor knew who she was. I mean, I had mentioned I have a Bachelor's of Music, which required me to take copious music history courses.
I believe I was in music history classes for, I'd say, two years straight, which is probably nothing compared to the level of education you've received, but I did not hear her name in a single lecture.
[Denise Boneau] No, people really weren't that aware of her. She, Berlioz is a composer who had a strange relationship with his own people, his French audience, and so he was not exactly popular at all during his time, but he was known as a writer, and people who are interested in 19th century music all through the 20th century read Berlioz's autobiography, his memoirs, and he mentions her a number of times in the autobiography. I would highly recommend Berlioz's memoirs to anybody who's interested in his time period because he's a really witty guy and very funny and has all sorts of little insights into what it was like to be living in the 1830s.
Oh, did I forget to mention, he was hired by the Bertin family to run the rehearsals of La Esmeralda because Louise obviously couldn't do it. I don't think that the the players were all men, obviously, at that time, and even up to the late 20th century, there were orchestras that didn't want to play under a female conductor or whatever.
[Leslie] What do you think about, and we touched upon this in the portions of the episode that we have recorded, what are your thoughts on the rumor that began as early as rehearsals that Berlioz was the one who had really written the music, especially the Air de Cloche?
[Denise Boneau] Berlioz actually addresses that in his memoir, so it's interesting to get his take. But one reason was, which was really strange, and he points this out in his memoir, his music was not popular. People ostracized him because he was so far out ahead of the game.
Interestingly, if you look at the manuscript score, the autograph manuscript, which is almost entirely in Louise Bertin's handwriting, the "Air de Cloche" is in the handwriting of Berlioz's copyist. But there's no reason for Berlioz to claim not to have written it. I mean, it was because he wasn't all that popular, so here he was like, all of a sudden they're saying, oh, it's by Berlioz.
And he's like, well, they don't really like my music, why do they? It was not really, I think what he said was, "Voilà la justice, there's justice for you." It's a piece I didn't even write, and they're saying it's by me, which was a little bit vexing to him.
But what he says in his memoir, specifically about the "Air de Cloche," is that he made a couple of suggestions, and probably the reason that the copy in the autograph manuscript is not in Louise's handwriting is because it was, the suggestions he made were probably made during the rehearsal, obviously very late in the process, and he would have just handed it to his copyist and gotten that done right away. But it keeps happening.
So when in Montpellier, when they did the recording and the concert performance, there were still critics there who were saying, it sounds like Berlioz, I bet Berlioz must have had a real hand in it, because she had some similar characteristics, musical characteristics, compositional techniques and things that were much more like Berlioz than the typical other composers of the day who were writing. She was interested in going from weird key to another weird key, and not following the very straight conventions that came out of the classical era or Beethoven or whatever.
[Patrick] The Air de Cloche is very different than the rest of La Esmeralda. You know, it's written in like 2-4, and it kind of sounds like a bell ringing itself, you know, bum bum bum bum bum.
[Denise Boneau] That was due to the fact that the verses that Hugo gave to her to write it are very short. They're like, you probably know.
[Patrick] Oh, they are three syllables each.
[Denise Boneau] Exactly.
[Patrick] I wrote a translation of Hugo's libretto last year as just a writing and translation project. And goodness, was that difficult to find English equivalents of a similar length.
[Denise Boneau] Right. To match up with his poetry. No, but he sent her fairly late in the process, like new text for Quasimodo's "Air de Cloche."
[Patrick] I know there's correspondence from 1833, fairly early on in the compositional history where Hugo jokingly says to Bertin, "Oh, here are the verses for Quasimodo's aria. I tried to make them as gay as I could, but I found it difficult to make them all together jolly. Do what you will with them."
[Denise Boneau] Very good. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I would love to be able to parse out a little bit more all the chronology of when certain things were written and when the certain verses.
I mean, I did some of that in my dissertation, but it would probably require, you know, much more in-depth look to find out any inconsistencies and, you know, if there was some way to match up what it was that he sent her first, or if it was different from what ended up as the "Air de Cloche." Like I said, she was in the forefront of the Romantic movement in France. She wrote the earliest Faust opera, and it was before the popularity of Gérard de Nerval's translation, which everybody says was what made Goethe's "Faust" popular in France.
And I found these two earlier ones and I proved, I matched them up to the text in "Fausto" that they're definitely taken from those French, early French translations. So it was, she wasn't working from the thing that became popular. She was already working from these earlier translations.
So anyway, but yeah, no, I think that if Hugo sent her three-syllable lines, that was going to have an effect on how she wrote the music, or she made, they may have had discussions between themselves about how to make bell sounds in this song. And it was, they knew it was going to be good because they took it out of the fifth act and dropped it into the fourth. It's the final version of the opera.
[Patrick] And it comes up very randomly, you know, Quasimodo at this point is mostly a mute character who he sings a duet with Frollo in act one, and he's in the stocks in act two, doesn't even appear in act three. And all of a sudden he's singing about, oh, in my soul, I'm beautiful. Who are you?
[Denise Boneau] Right. And that's because, I mean, it is taken out of the context that they originally intended it to be. I mean, it would have been, it would be so great to find the fifth act if it still existed.
[Leslie] Oh, maybe it'll turn up in a farmhouse or something, please God.
[Denise Boneau] Yeah, exactly. So I'm of retirement age now. And after having my life upended in numerous ways over the past 30 or so years, I am now able to get back to musicology, which I had to put aside for a number of different reasons.
And so I'm looking forward to publishing articles that address some of these things and going back and doing more in-depth study. And there are things that we didn't know, that there was no way I could have known about. Like there was a German edition of "The Werewolf" that was probably produced, but they translated it into German.
And it was, interestingly enough, a woman theater director who did the translation. And so there's this opera, there's her, Bertin's music set to German words. And there's a source of music that you can download and print music for free from if it's been the public domain, basically.
And so people, there's a lot of music on this website. And that was the only score known to the people that wanted to do "Le Loup-Garou." They were like, we're going to have to translate it back into French.
How are we going to do that? Because they didn't know that there was a French version, because only the German one was in this website. And I didn't even know about that 40 years ago.
There may be things that other people have found that I don't even know yet. And I'm eager to get back to seeing what's out there, basically.
[Leslie] I'm really excited to read your work. I'm very happy to hear that you're getting back into the field. And truly, if there's anything that we can do for you, I mean, you have been so generous with your time and expertise today.
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