L'enfance du Christ

Bored one evening while his friends played cards, Berlioz sketched out the beginnings of a “four-part andantino for organ”. This fragment, with its “rustic” and “naïve” character, would become “The Shepherds’ Farewell”, the heart of the composer’s oratorio L’enfance du Christ (1854). It would also become the basis of one of the great pranks of musical history. Suspicious of critics who had panned his recent works, Berlioz premiered this initial movement (and subsequently an expanded episode) under the name Pierre Ducré, supposedly a 17th-century French composer. Critics fell for it, even declaring that “Berlioz could never have written” music of such simplicity and sweetness. Public approval survived the truth, and the finished oratorio became one of the composer’s most popular works, praised for its “angelic purity”. Its biblical story is divided into three episodes: Part I tells the story of Herod’s massacre of the innocents, Part II of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, and Part III their arrival and welcome by the Ishmaelites. A tenor narrator—heir to the Evangelists of Bach’s Passions—guides listeners through the drama, which unfolds in a sequence of vivid and varied episodes. First, a “cabalistic procession” of soothsayers, wild, eerie and unsettling. Then, a sombre aria for Herod “Ô misère des rois!” followed by a delicate trio for flutes and harp to welcome the Holy Family to Egypt. Finally, a ravishing unaccompanied final chorus “Ô mon âme”.