There’s something to be said for occasional music. Composers of note today don’t write a lot of it — a few birthday pieces here and there for various gray eminences (John Corigliano and Pierre Boulez for Sir Georg Solti), a commission as a memorial (9/11 nevr4get) or to, say, launch a new music director (Magnus Lindberg for Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic). Composers don’t get asked to write new works to celebrate the opening of a new library or the conclusion of some grand interstate-highway construction project. Instead, there might be speeches and a reception for the politicians and donors (should there have been any) afterwards, but nothing that stands for centuries after, aside from the work itself, should it be so fortunate.
Hector Berlioz
Which makes Berlioz’s Chant des chemins de fer (Hymn to the Railroad, or Railway Cantata), written in the space of three days in 1846, such a curious little big piece. Less than ten minutes long but scored for full orchestra (minus tuba), chorus and tenor soloist, it packs a mighty wallop which must surely have captured the proud emotions felt of the townspeople of Lille as the railroad (Gare du Nord) connected them to Paris. Jules Janin‘s poem celebrates the workers who built the railroad calling them “soldiers of peace” for whom “a crown awaits.” It hits all the big patriotic themes: the King, the fatherland, while adding another: “Commerce and its benefits!”
The big refrain, repeated six times, is a lusty tune in 6/8 time, but Berlioz doesn’t stick to the main key of B major - it climaxes on in an unsuspected G-major chord before returning back to B. There’s a verse celebrating the railroad’s traversal of the mountains in D, a solemn hymn for just the basses in E (“When they see this sight, old men / Will go to their graves smiling”), and an odd passage only six measures long in which the tenor sings with whirligig accompaniment from the winds (“Witnesses to these industrial marvels / We must raise a hymn to peace!”). In the last verse, Berlioz modulates to the delightfully difficult key of G-sharp major. What could have been a straightforward exercise in musical patriotism is instead a chance to work out a few harmonic challenges, giving the chorus something more interesting to chew on and keep the orchestra paying attention.
Nathan Gunn - Here to break up the text Photo by Dario Acosta
No one writes music like this anymore! (No one writes poetry like that, either, but that’s another topic.) We don’t have orchestras and choruses at hand, and an operatic tenor ready to sing the praises of the hard hats who hoisted beams and ran the wiring and probably did something with a “joist.” And I for one think the world is poorer for it. John Williams gave it a noble effort with the quartet he composed for Barack Obama’s inauguration, but, come on — a quartet? For the President? Berlioz would have scoffed. Everyone knows it would’ve been better with an orchestra of 100, a choir of 200, and Nathan Gunn** up there belting out an ode to tolerance and freedom and the sheer awesomeness of drone airplanes as antiterrorist weapons. Do that with some F-16s flying in formation overhead, and Sarah Palin herself would’ve admitted to getting Obama “all wrong back there.”
I digress. Berlioz barely mentions the Hymn to the Railroad in his truly funny, deeply tragic, Memoirs. The scholar and conductor D. Kern Holoman fondly labels it as “certainly worth an occasional hearing,” though, and that seems just. Berlioz’s biographer David Cairns tells us the work’s score was stolen after the performance in Lille, but recovered, and gives more time to relating the difficulties surrounding the week’s events (“thieves were everywhere”) than the piece itself. (Side note: Has anyone, anywhere, tried to steal a new piece of music since 1846?)
Me, I’d like to see more room given to works like this, history’s oddballs that don’t fit neatly into any sort of scheme. Part cantata, part rousing paean to science and progress, it’s emblematic of its time in a way that, say, the Damnation of Faust, written at the same time, isn’t. We know a little bit more about those provincial Frenchmen having heard this piece.
As far as I know, there’s only one recording of the Chant des chemins de fer, in a two-disc collection of Berlioz’s little-known choral works conducted by Michel Plasson. You can find it as a reissue from ArkivMusic. EMI hasn’t saw fit to put that on iTunes yet, so you can’t get just that piece for $0.99. Je suis désolée.
** I know Gunn is a baritone and not a tenor; the point is, he’s an American opera star and looks like a million dollars