An attempt upon the life of King Louis Philippe, on 28 July 1835, spurred Berlioz to devote his attention to an already begun third symphony of seven movements -- a monumental fête musicale funèbre "in memory of the illustrious men of France" -- whose composition occupied him into the fall. Indeed, work on his opera, Benvenuto Cellini, ground to a halt to make way for it, even as the composer's new career as France's sharpest music critic began to take its toll on his time and energies.
Little remains of the original plan for the fête musicale, though it is apparent that much of its music took its final form in the Requiem and the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840). Le Cinq Mai, on the other hand, is evidently one of the completed pieces of the planned fête which was not recycled. While the major part of its composition is usually assigned to the shadowy period of early fall 1835, Berlioz seems to have begun his setting of Béranger's poem in the 1820s. He tells us in Les Grotesques de la musique that he found music for the refrain only in 1831, as he was pulling himself out of the Tiber, in Rome, after having fallen in. Enormously popular -- and admired by Goethe and Stendhal as well -- Jean-Pierre de Béranger (1780 - 1857) possessed a common touch, and his lines in which an old soldier passes by Saint Helena as a black flag signals Napoleon's passing, on 5 May 1821, had an immediate appeal, and not only in France. In Berlioz's concert tours throughout Europe in the 1840s, Le Cinq Mai was one of the mainstays of his programs and called for often. Berlioz finds fresh inspiration for each of the poem's five stanzas. In the third, the bass is joined by a chorus of tenors and basses to tell how Napoleon fatigued victory to win a poisoned crown. A recollection of Napoleonic glory by chorus and soloist gives way to a shuddering final stanza in which sopranos are heard for the first time -- to moving effect. If Berlioz misses the epic grandeur for which he is obviously striving, Le Cinq Mai is nevertheless an effectively imposing piece. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
