Bonaparte in E-flat
Anthony Burgess's Napoleon Symphony at 50.
Anthony Burgess began work on his Napoleon project in 1972, shortly after Stanley Kubrick’s film version of A Clockwork Orange had been released. He began the novel with the intention of writing a potential vehicle for Kubrick to adapt.
Kubrick had been intending to direct a film about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, and he had already completed a draft version of the script. When Burgess was invited to dinner at Kubrick’s house, Abbot’s Mead, in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, the two men discussed the impossibility of presenting the life of the Corsican conqueror on the big screen. Burgess suggested that music was the key to the problem, and that the film should imitate a symphonic work for a large orchestra.
What he had in mind was a novel in four movements, taking its structure from Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica. Burgess planned his novel carefully, intending that each section within the narrative would correspond to a passage in Beethoven’s score. The main chapters of Napoleon Symphony clearly refer to the four distinct movements that we find in Beethoven: Allegro con brio, Marcia funebre, Scherzo, and Finale.
In addition to the four main sections, Burgess adds a prologue in which Napoleon, in disguise as ‘Joseph Goodpart’, secretly marries Joséphine de Beauharnais. The novel concludes with a verse-epilogue in heroic couplets, which comments on the foregoing narrative in a metafictional way.
The idea of using Beethoven’s symphony as a structuring principle came from the composer’s original plan to dedicate his work to Napoleon — which he later abandoned after Napoleon invited the Pope to crown him Emperor of the French in 1804. Disgusted by this self-promoting event, Beethoven commented: ‘Now he will trample on all the rights of man and only indulge his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others and become a tyrant!’
Burgess, who was himself a musician and went on to compose two symphonies, was always looking for ways to imitate musical structures in prose. In 1991 he made another attempt to represent a symphony in fictional form — in Mozart and the Wolf Gang, he included a short story based on Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in G Minor.
Burgess sent the first 75 pages of Napoleon Symphony to Kubrick in the summer of 1972. Kubrick read this extract and thought about it carefully, before sending an elegant letter of rejection. He told Burgess that, although the writing was ‘excellent’, it did not solve the cinematic narrative problems he’d been wrestling with for more than four years. Burgess pressed on with his novel, eventually sharing the dedication between his wife, Liana, and Kubrick.
One of the key elements of Napoleon Symphony is the generous way it gives voice to ordinary foot-soldiers in Napoleon’s army, often using the vernacular language which was familiar to Burgess from his experience of the British Army during the Second World War. In this passage, we hear an anonymous Napoleonic soldier complaining about the privations of the Egyptian campaign:
Once or twice we came to villages, but they were empty or full of dead that the Bedouins had left to the flies and the ants, and the wells had been filled in with stones. Soon it was Alexander Carrère that went mad and shot himself and nobody stopped him. We were like silent ghosts going through that sand, and the only sound was the buzzing of these fucking great black flies. The sky was pure metal, pewter or brass or something, clanking down on your head with no noise, and the sun was like a great round arse shitting fire.
When the British and American editions of the novel were published in 1974, most critics responded with baffled hostility. John Bayley, writing in the New York Review of Books, praised a few scenes but concluded that Burgess was a minor talent when measured against James Joyce and Anthony Powell. In The Times, Michael Ratcliffe compared the novel unfavourably with the work of Vladimir Nabokov. Emma Tennant, writing in the Listener, complained that Napoleon Symphony smelled of garlicky Corsican sausage — but she said that the account of the Egyptian campaign was a masterpiece.
The most favourable and perceptive review came from Frank Kermode in the Guardian: ‘It is fair to say that one could read the novel with great pleasure without bothering about Beethoven. Burgess is writing very serious comedy and doing it with extraordinary resource, variety and grace.’
Symphonie Napoléon, the French translation by Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier, was acclaimed by the critics as a major novel of its day. On publication, Burgess was widely interviewed by French newspapers and magazines, and the translation, published by Robert Laffont, remained in print for 25 years.
In the mid-1980s, Burgess reworked his Napoleon material as a stage play, titled Napoleon Rising. Originally intended for performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the play was eventually broadcast in 2012 as a BBC radio drama, adapted by Anjum Malik and directed by Polly Thomas. The radio production featured Toby Jones as Napoleon and Alex Jennings as Talleyrand.
Napoleon Symphony is a dense and rewarding novel, undoubtedly one of Burgess’s most important works, which continues to provoke its readers and critics. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 2012, Hal Jensen said:
In the fourth movement of the novel, Burgess treats the reader to a series of alternating styles, parodying the classics of English literature. It is undeniable fun to watch Napoleon create his garden in the style of Wordsworth’s Prelude, witness that garden’s storm-blasted destruction in the plaintive tones of Ruskin, read of the hero’s death as if in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and hear his legend told through the strangled syntax of late Henry James.
Fifty years after its first publication, readers are still coming to terms with Burgess’s complex, multi-voiced, late-modernist masterpiece. Along with the fictional life of Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun, it is one of his most accomplished historical novels.
Find out more
Laura Tunbridge, Professor of Music at Oxford University, delivers the Anthony Burgess Lecture on Burgess and Beethoven, recorded at the Burgess Foundation in 2021:
Christine Lee Gengaro, the editor of This Man and Music (Manchester University Press), talks about Burgess’s compositions and his musical autobiography in our podcast, The Music of Anthony Burgess:
Paul Phillips has edited a collection of Burgess’s musical essays, The Devil Prefers Mozart, published by Carcanet in 2024. He talks about the book in this podcast:
Excellent! All thumbs up!