The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting 1.
“The number
[of performers] indicated is only relative.
If space permits, the
chorus may be doubled or tripled,
and the orchestra be proportionally increased.”
Hector Berlioz. Music Instructions to the
Grand Messe des Morts.
I’m
now moving on to an exciting new cluster of chapters under the general heading The Bard. The reader is up for new
revelations, new exciting discoveries, and lots of fun. The first chapter
centers on the character of M. A. Berlioz in M. A. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Oh the suspense!
It will be mounting from one name to another!
Mikhail
Alexandrovich Berlioz appears on the very first page of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita in the company of
the poet Ivan Bezdomny.
Two
questions arise at once:
Why
does Bulgakov give this highly unsympathetic personage whose head he cuts
mercilessly off at the end of chapter 3, his own initials: MAB?
And
also: why does he give this man a French last name? And not just that. Berlioz
is the last name of the great French composer of the first half of the 19th
century, who wrote the symphonic poem for voices and orchestra, which he called
a “dramatic legend” titled The Damnation
of Faust (1846), a further development of the earlier written Eight Scenes From Faust.
Curiously,
the great Hector Berlioz was immensely interested in Goethe’s Faust theme, but he was never ready to
write a full opera on this subject. Still his “Dramatic Legend” for
voices, narrator, choir, and orchestra was impressive enough to draw to its
Paris performances such luminaries of music as F. Liszt, F. Chopin, and N.
Paganini, and of the literary world such as A. Dumas, V. Hugo, H. Heine, and T.
Gautier, among others.
As
for the unconsummated “Grand Opera,” it would be written 13 years later, in
1859, by another French composer Charles Gounod, who entered the Elysium of
musical history on its account.
***
Bulgakov
makes his “Misha” Berlioz an atheist, whereas Hector Berlioz was a son of an
unapologetically agnostic father and a devout Catholic mother.
Having
picked as the epigraph to his life’s work a quote from Goethe’s Faust, Bulgakov set himself the task of
choosing a prototype for this character – M. A. Berlioz – dying at the end of
Chapter 3. Curiously, one of Hector Berlioz’s most celebrated works is La Grande Messe des Morts, that is, his Requiem for the Dead, a groundbreaking
achievement.
Why
am I writing all this? Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita has three characters named after three music composers:
Berlioz, Rimsky, and Stravinsky. I used to be wondering all the time who they
were anyway. Only Rimsky fits in straightforwardly as the author of The Golden Cockerel. Bulgakov makes the
connection in the scene with the vampire Gella, where the despondent Rimsky is
being saved by a sudden crow of a rooster.
So,
Rimsky was fairly easy, but Berlioz and Stravinsky had escaped me. (See my
chapters Swallow’s Nest and Strangers in the Night.)
Yet
Bulgakov himself links Professor Stravinsky with Pontius Pilate, having written
two parallel scenes: one, with Pontius Pilate, in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate and the other, with Dr.
Stravinsky, at the psychiatric clinic, which has led me to the understanding
that M. Bulgakov’s Stravinsky and Pontius Pilate must have one and the same
prototype. Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs support this fact as well:
“I remember some kind of green room, but not the main one, but the
one where they are waiting for stage entrance. A black, thick (about 20),
men-only group of poets, and towering them all, indeed heading them – Bryusov. I enter and stop, waiting for somebody’s
first step. And it was made right away – by Bryusov. And this is the poetess Marina Tsvetaeva…”
And
here is Bulgakov:
“The door to Ivan’s room opened suddenly and a multitude of people
in white [sic!] coats entered through it. Ahead of them all, came carefully an
actor-style shaven man of about 45, with pleasant, but very piercing eyes and
polite manners... His retinue was showing him signs of respect and attention,
and because of it, his entrance turned out quite solemn. Like Pontius Pilate, thought Ivan.”
The
“black” (most likely due to their black suits or tuxedos) thick group of poets
in Tsvetaeva, changes to “white coats” in the scene at the psychiatric clinic
in Bulgakov. But Dr. Stravinsky is walking ahead of a group of his subordinates
just like Pontius Pilate walks ahead of his in the 2nd chapter of Master and Margarita, even though in the
following passage this fact has been masked. –
“Then, all present started descending a broad staircase... And so,
Pilate ascended the platform. As soon as the white cloak with blood-color
lining rose to a height over the edge of the human sea [sic!], the blinded
Pilate’s ears were hit by a sound wave: Ga-a-a!!!
It started in a low volume, then increasing to a thundering level. They saw me!, thought the procurator.”
The
wording here obviously indicates that Pontius Pilate was the first to ascend
the platform built for such occasions, followed by the rest of the group
consisting of the members of the Synhedrion.
Thus
Dr. Stravinsky with his retinue and Pontius Pilate with his group are
practically copied from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoir of the winter of 1911-1912
about her invitation to a meeting of the Society
of Free Aesthetics.
“A black, thick, men-only group of poets, and towering them all,
indeed heading them – Bryusov.”
The
two pictures – Stravinsky and Pontius Pilate – overlap in Ivan Bezdomny’s
imagination.
“Like Pontius Pilate,
thought Ivan.”
This
fact and also Dr. Stravinsky’s habit to repeat the word “slavno, glorious” – “glorious,
glorious!” indicate that Dr. Stravinsky’s prototype is also V. Ya. Bryusov.
There are two reasons for that:
1. Firstly, Bryusov was a poet in his own right and he
taught young Russian poets the art of writing poetry. Likewise, Dr. Stravinsky
taught young doctors and walked surrounded by them.
2. Secondly, Bulgakov is using the word “glorious” too many times. The Russian
word “slavno” is derived from “slava, glory.” The reader already knows
from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs that V. Ya. Bryusov strove for power and glory.
[See my chapter The Garden.]
Thus,
totally unexpectedly for myself, I made another discovery. And now I can return
to the character of M. A. Berlioz in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.
***
Why
the French name at all? As I already wrote before in this chapter, Bryusov was
very much interested in French Symbolism and applied himself to writing new
Russian Symbolist poetry, becoming a poet due to his enormous capacity to work
and teach the new poetic genre to beginning Russian poets, being greatly
respected in the Russian poetry world.
***
M.
A. Bulgakov gives his initials MAB to M. A. Berlioz for the reason that, being
a poet whose followers included Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Nikolai Gumilev, to
mention just a few luminaries, Bryusov happened to be Head of LITO in Soviet
times. It was up to him therefore, what was going to be published and what
wasn’t. Thus the identical initials provide extra importance for this otherwise
secondary character of Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita.
To
be continued…
***
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