Hugo, Victor (EN)

Hugo Victor, *26 February 1802 Besançon, †22 May 1885 Paris, poet, dramatist, novelist, and public figure, a leading figure of French Romanticism. With the exception of his childhood years spent in southern Europe (Corsica, Naples, Madrid) within the sphere of Napoleonic conquests and influence (while his father pursued a military career), and part of his later life (1851–71) spent in voluntary exile (Belgium, England) as a republican protest against the new empire, throughout his life Hugo was associated with Paris, which became the forum for his astonishingly versatile and spectacular activity (member of the Academy, Peer of France, deputy). As a poet, he made his debut in the 1820s with series of early Romantic odes, ballads, and orientales (Middle Eastern tales), in which convention was replaced by truth of expression and imagination, and classical beauty by what is characteristic. In numerous collections from the 1830s and 1840s (including Songs of Twilight 1835, Beams and Shadows 1840), the Romantic miniature of pure lyricism comes to the fore, “written with soul and heart”; intimate and elegiac expressions intertwine with heroism and pathos. In the heterogeneous works of later years (numerous volumes of The Legend of the Ages 1854–83), epic elements with existential and metaphysical accents prevail. As a prose writer, Hugo gained fame through The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), works that established the canon of the Romantic novel, appealing to a broad audience through ethical sensitivity and exalted expression. Hugo achieved his greatest fame and significance as a creator of Romantic theatre, a codifier of the genre (Romantic drama), which, under the influence of opera, combined the sublime with the grotesque, taking in the 19th century the place of the classical pair of genres: tragedy and comedy. The staging of the first two of Hugo’s nine dramas (Cromwell 1827, Hernani 1830) became a manifestation of the Romantic movement; Hugo saw its guiding idea in the category of freedom.

Hugo’s work testifies to the highest degree of engagement with the issues of his time; its thematic diversity can be reduced to the problem of the human condition in historical and social, existential and transcendent dimensions (the fight between good and evil, the annihilation of evil through love, the movement toward light). The constitutive features of Hugo’s style: vitality, freedom, exuberance, excess, violence, suddenness, power, bravura, tempo, the use of bold metaphor, striking contrast, rhetorical emphasis alongside lyrical subtlety, extreme antithesis or exaggerated hyperbole, persistent refrain-like structures, and sudden shifts of expression – were taken up and developed (also in music) mainly by post-Romantic and modernist generations, and rejected by Impressionists and Neoclassicists. Hugo’s verse, masterful in versification and remarkable for its diversity of solutions (heterosyllabism, heterometry, heterostrophic forms), is based on the opposition between an initial order (the alexandrine, the Sapphic stanza) and expressive flexibility (freedom of the caesura, frequent enjambment, variability of modulation brought about by the abundance of interrogations and exclamations).

Although the majority of Hugo’s work is phonetically self-sufficient (sonorité éclatante), his presence in the history of 19th-century music, particularly French music, became significant. Approximately 1,000 songs were composed to his texts; one may distinguish successive phases of interest: Berlioz and H. Mompou (1830s), Liszt and Wagner (1840s), Gounod and Lalo (1850s), Bizet and Fauré (1860s), Franck, Massenet, and d’Indy (1870s and later); two composers, H. Reber and Saint-Saëns, set Hugo’s texts to music throughout their lives. It was on Hugo’s texts that the transition in French song took place from the sentimental and early Romantic romance to the Romantic mélodie, the counterpart of the German Lied. Cantatas to Hugo’s epic-lyric texts were composed by Berlioz, Hérold, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Franck, and d’Indy. Hugo’s dramas and novels became the basis for several operas of a new style (sometimes composed to the poet’s own libretti), especially by Italian composers such as Donizetti, Verdi, and Ponchielli. Hugo’s epic themes were adopted as programs for piano works and symphonic poems by Liszt and C. Franck.

Literature: V. Guille Victor Hugo et son oeuvre, Paris 1950; J.B. Barrère Victor Hugo. L’homme et l’oeuvre, Paris 1959, Polish trans. J. Parvi, Warsaw 1968; A. Jullien Les drames de Victor Hugo et la musique, “Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris” 1872; P. Glachant Victor Hugo et la musique, “La Revue Musicale” 1902; “La Revue Musicale” – special issue, 1935 no. 9/10; L. Guichard La musique et les lettres au temps du romantisme, Paris 1955; E. Appia Victor Hugo et la musique in: De Palestrina à Bartok, Paris 1965; F. Weil Victor Hugo et Richard Wagner, Bern 1926; A. Laster Berlioz et Victor Hugo, “Revue de Musicologie” 1977 no. 1/2; R. Turner A Comparison of Two Set of Liszt-Hugo Songs, “American Liszt-Society Journal” 1979 no. 5 ; J.A. Delaire Histoire de la romance, Paris 1845; P. Scudo Esquisse d’une histoire de la romance, Paris 1856; F. Noske La mélodie française de Berlioz à Duparc, Paris 1954.