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Review of Soubre, Sinfonie fantastique ￃ grand orchestre, edited by Francesca Brittan (A-R Editions, 2017).
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Only the most enthusiastic fan of nineteenth-century Franco-Belgian music would know the name Étienne-Joseph Soubre (1813-71). Born and raised in Liège, Soubre attended the École royale de musique, where his primary instrument was the bassoon. By 1839, he began to make a name as a conductor and composer, first directing the Liège Opera and then the orchestra of the newly formed Société du Conservatoire (p. vii). As a winner of the 1841 Belgian Prix de Rome, he heard his compositions performed in Italy, Germany and France. Although by 1845 he had settled into a teaching career in Liège and Brussels, he continued to compose works of modest proportions (songs and short choral pieces) and more ambitious ones, such the three-act opera Isoline, ou Les chaperons blancs and a handful of orchestral works.
A-R Editions makes a compelling case for this little-known Belgian composer with the first published edition of Soubre's Sinfonie fantastique ￃ grand orchestre, part of the exploratory series Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Soubre's three-movement symphony premiered in 1835 in Liège, and was greeted with positive reviews from French, German and Italian critics. By all accounts, the work held its own in its day. But we must address the elephant in the room: the title immediately - and inevitably - calls to mind Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830). Indeed, as editor Francesca Brittan notes, Soubre was familiar with Berlioz's published programme for the Symphonie fantastique before he embarked on his own 'fantastic symphony', and had most certainly acquired a copy of Liszt's piano transcription before he completed his own composition (p. xi). Soubre's Sinfonie, then, offers a glance at the musical thought processes of a composer early in his career, and provides music historians with a 'missing piece' of Berlioz's reception history (p. vii). This new publication thus addresses some historiographical questions in nineteenth-century music studies. For instance, to what extent does Soubre's composition challenge longstanding preconceptions of Berlioz as a composer isolated from his milieu? And, more broadly, does the publication of Soubre's work destabilize the way we consider Berlioz vis ￃ vis notions...