L’Enfance du Christ, Op. 25

Program notes

About the Work

L’Enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ) grew backwards, from its middle outwards. In 1850 Hector Berlioz wrote a short piece for organ for his friend Joseph-Louis Duc, and soon turned it into a chorus in which shepherds bid farewell to the infant Jesus as the Holy Family leaves Bethlehem. He then played a practical joke on Paris: he had the chorus performed as the work of “Pierre Ducré”, an invented seventeenth-century choirmaster of the Sainte-Chapelle. Listeners who normally found Berlioz noisy and bizarre praised the piece warmly, and one lady is said to have remarked that Berlioz could never write a tune as simple and charming as old Ducré’s.

The chorus became the centre of La Fuite en Égypte (The Flight into Egypt), to which Berlioz added an overture and a tenor narration describing the Holy Family at rest. Its success persuaded him to continue. He wrote L’Arrivée à Saïs (The Arrival at Saïs), in which the exhausted travellers look for shelter in Egypt, and finally, in 1854, a new opening part, Le Songe d’Hérode (Herod’s Dream). Berlioz wrote the words himself, based loosely on the account in Matthew’s Gospel, and called the result a trilogie sacrée, a sacred trilogy.

The first complete performance, conducted by Berlioz in Paris on 10 December 1854, was an immediate success with a Parisian press that had usually been hostile to him. Some critics put this down to a new, gentler manner. Berlioz rejected the idea firmly: the subject called for simple music, he wrote, and he would have written the piece in exactly the same way twenty years earlier.

The score deliberately looks back. He used an archaic style in his text, touches of the old church modes, and a trio for two flutes and harp to suggest an ancient, far-off world. The work ends not with a grand chorus but with a quiet, unaccompanied one. It has long been a favourite at Christmas.

What to Listen For

Part One: Herod’s Dream. There is no overture. The narrator (tenor) sets the scene in a few lines, and then Roman soldiers patrol the streets of Jerusalem at night in a Marche nocturne: a quiet, fugal march whose lines weave in and out of each other as the patrol comes and goes. Herod (bass) is sleepless, haunted by a recurring dream of a child who will overthrow him. His long aria “O misère des rois” is one of the finest things in the score, gloomy and modal, with low brass shadowing his despair. Soothsayers are summoned and perform a strange, fitful dance in 7/4 time before confirming his fears; Herod orders every newborn child to be killed. The scene then changes to the stable at Bethlehem, where Mary and Joseph sing tenderly over the child, until an unseen choir of angels warns them to flee. Berlioz asks for these voices to sound from a distance, with an organ.

Part Two: The Flight into Egypt. This short central part is the original Fuite en Égypte. A gentle, modal overture leads to L’Adieu des bergers (The Shepherds’ Farewell), the chorus that began the whole project. The narrator then describes the family resting by the roadside in Le Repos de la Sainte Famille, a pastoral scene in which female voices join briefly at the end.

Part Three: The Arrival at Saïs. After three days crossing the desert the family reaches the Egyptian city of Saïs. Mary and Joseph beg for shelter and are turned away at door after door, with anxious, stumbling music in the orchestra. Finally an Ishmaelite father of a family (baritone) takes them in, and, discovering that Joseph is a carpenter like him, has music played to comfort the guests. Their music is the Trio for two flutes and harp, one of the very few pieces of chamber music Berlioz ever wrote. In the epilogue the narrator reflects on the story, and the work ends with the unaccompanied chorus “O mon âme”, which fades into silence.