100 articles down on Ciao and I have come to the shocking realization that despite my username, I have only written one review concerning Hector Berlioz, a rather old review of the Symphonie Fantastique that probably could use a revision anyway. So what better way to celebrate a milestone such as this than to divulge on the life of my favourite composer.

(Note, this is meant as a tribute rather than some all-encompassing biography of the man, concentrating on various thoughts I have of him rather than just facts of his life's events.)

OF BERLIOZ AND HIS YOUTH

Hector Berlioz is the archetype of who you could term as a "romantic". Standing as one of the first pure representations of a new generation of artists that had no connections to the more stately and aristocratic Classical era and was a self-sustaining "artiste" without any high-bred patrons to help along, Berlioz forged his sense of poetic art without any restrictions to décor or expectations. However it was originally not to be so. His father was a distinguished doctor in the small town of La Côte Saint-André, where Louis-Hector was born on December 11, 1803. Being taught mostly by his freethinking father, he had high aspirations for him to continue his profession and become a doctor, but Hector's poetic thoughts had a tendency to come in the way and he became interested in composition very early on as a perfect medium for his passions (ironically something his father first encouraged to him as a hobby). Between 1817 and 1823 he did write quite a few songs (most importantly the song "Je vais donc quitter pour jamais" that became the opening for the Symphonie Fantastique), a pastorale "Estelle et Némorin" and two flute quintets that were all destroyed later on as Berlioz moved to Paris. He hated having inferior stuff of his flying around and sometimes went to great distances to destroy earlier compositions, though ironically some of these pieces have been found again later on (such as his Messe Solennelle of 1824, which proved to be a regular mine for his later works).

His move to Paris was still going in his father's direction, though, as he rolled to the Hospice de la Pitié for his medical studies, but his first experience was pretty discouraging as Berlioz himself relates in his Mémoirs:

"At the sight of that terrible charnel-house - the fragments of limbs, the grinning heads and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off, the swarms of sparrows wrangling over scraps of lung, the rats in their corner gnawing the bleeding vertebrae - such a feeling of revulsion possessed me that I leapt through the window of the dissecting-room and fled for home as through Death and all his hideous train were at my heels. The shock of the first impression lasted for twenty-four hours."

It was soon after this that he discovered the desire for composition above all else after his visits to the Opéra and declared to his family that he would give up medicine and become a composer. His family, of course, didn't take it all that well, his father pretty much leaving him to fend for himself with the hope that he would soon return to the right train of thought, and his über-religious mother cursed him for associating with the un-godly arts. Nevertheless, young Hector was not to be swayed and he signed into the Paris Conservatoire.

OF BERLIOZ AND THE POETIC IDEAL

Coming straight on the heels of Beethoven, who was still fairly unknown and considered as an unprincipled radical, Berlioz had a life-long belief in the sense that music had to be the expression of the artist's longings, passions and ideals in the dramatic sense rather that simply consisting of technically sound composition (he had a deep dislike towards fugues in particular). With his introduction to Beethoven at the Conservatoire (of whom his teacher Lesueur said "music like that ought not to be written"), it showed a whole new world for Berlioz, the dramatic possibilities of which when combined with the poetry of Shakespeare and Virgil offered new roads never before properly explored. This is well in evidence that only two works of Berlioz's are completely devoid of extra-musical programmes (the Toccata for harmonium of 1844 and the "Rêverie et Caprice" for violin and orchestra of 1841). And despite what programme music became to signify in later times, Berlioz's conception was to make the music even more potent when allowing definite ideals and characters to inhabit the music without descending to empty rhetoric. This "poetic ideal" would stay with the composer throughout his life in his music, as well as in his sense as an artist.

OF BERLIOZ AND WOMEN

Berlioz was practically never alone as far as women were concerned, but he always stayed faithful to whomever he was connected with at all times. The women in his life, as he recounts in his Mémoires, all in their ways conformed to his poetic ideal (which probably was his greatest weakness in that sector). When still a teenager, he was madly infatuated with an older woman (aged 18 at the time) named Estelle Duboeuf who to his fertile mind became to signify the poetically romantic ideal of a woman. He was always too timid in her presence to make any suggestions to her and settled to just admire her from afar. She would be a direct influence as the main character for Berlioz's early pastoral opera "Estelle et Némorin" (Némorin being Hector himself). But she was married, and she would remain but the the ideal of the romantic heroine Berlioz was forever after.

In Paris, shortly after doing his first major compositions in the late 1820s, an English theater company came to Paris, and along with them came an Irish woman named Harriet Smithson. Despite starting to show a decline in her star power, Berlioz was overwhelmed when he went to see them perform Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Harriet (or Henriette as Berlioz called her) was another example of the romantic ideal that here combined an unattainable fantasy for the young, sensitive composer of the perfect woman in the best romantic and poetic way. But Berlioz couldn't go to her either, she was also unattainable to him. During a rehearsal where he was to perform his Waverley Overture:

"I came in just as the frantic Romeo was bearing Juliet in his arms. My glance fell involuntarily on the Shakespearian scene. I gave a shriek and fled, wringing my hands. Juliet saw me and heard my cry. She was afraid. Pointing me out to the actors who were on

stage with her, she warned them to beware of that 'gentleman with the eyes that bode no good'."

Such was her allure, though, that Berlioz was inspired to write his first masterpiece after her, the Symphonie Fantastique, or "An Episode in the Life of an Artist," the secret beloved of the work being Harriet.

Soon after Harriet left Paris for Amsterdam, Berlioz got engaged to a young pianist Camille Moke (notorious for being very flimsy with men). Unfortunately in late 1830 he chanced to finally win the coveted Prix de Rome prize that stipulated all winners must travel to Rome for a year to "absorb the atmosphere of the immortal city" and he had to leave Camille to Paris along with his marketing of the new symphony. While in Rome he then received a letter from Camille's mother stating that the engagement was over between him and her daughter and that Camille had found somebody else. Berlioz went mad and devised the most elaborate revenge on her in traveling back to Paris, disguised as a servant girl, and then kill the whole lot:

"I set out accordingly along the road to Nice. Far from having cooled off, I rehearsed in my mind every detail of the little comedy I intended to enact when I reached Paris. I go to my friends' house at nine in the evening just when the family has assembled for tea. I say I am the Countess M----'s personal maid with an urgent message. I am shown into the drawing-room, where I deliver a letter. While it is being read I draw my double-barreled pistols, blow out the brains of mother and lover, seize C- by the hair, reveal myself and, disregarding her screams, pay my respects to her in similar fashion, after which, before this cantata for voices and orchestra has had time to attract attention, I present my right temple with the unanswerable argument of the remaining barrel; or should the gun by any chance misfire, I have recourse to my cordials. It would have made a fine scene..."

Fortunately for him his disguise bought in Rome got misplaced on the way and he had to get a new one. In the mean time he had sufficient time to cool and finally decided to take a little vacation and let the affair go, spending some time in Nice and composing the King Lear Overture. Back in Paris in the December of 1832, he arranged a concert of his works where the Symphony and its sequel Lélio (composed in Rome) were performed, and it was at the congregation of the many stellar young artists that he was introduced to Harriet, she having heard of her influence in the work in question and being in need for some attention as her career was spiralling downward. The two eventually married on October 3, 1833, with tempestuous results.

Now that Berlioz has got his Ophelia, his Juliet, reality set in and Harriet proved to be something else entirely. Shortly afterwards Harriet injured herself, thus effectively putting an end to her career, and the birth of their son Louis in 1834 made further demands on their lives. Berlioz has to suspend full-time composing and become a music critic in order to make a living (a profession he detested immensely, but one he had to continue nearly all his life), while relations with Harriet went from bad to worse, eventually leading to them separating, though not divorcing. In 1848 she suffered a series of strokes and was basically left paralysed until her death on March 3, 1854. Her death finally freed Berlioz to marry singer Marie Recio, whom he has been seeing since 1841. But apparently he had no great feelings towards her, stating to his son that he married her out of duty. Nothing much is said of Marie other than she was obviously pretty disagreeable though a good organiser, but nothing much else is reported of her until her death on June 13, 1862 at the age of 48. Both his wives are buried in the same mausoleum along with Berlioz.

One last, notable moment in Berlioz's life of the "ideal woman" came with his re-acquaintance with Estelle (now Fornier) after 40 years upon his visit to his old home and his subsequent visit to her at Lyon (all of this is quite poetically told in his Mémoires). It perfectly bookends his relations with women in returning to his first crush. They engaged in correspondence and even met a couple of times, but that is as far as it ever got. All of them in their own ways were, however, but images of the poetic, images that often proved to be illusions.

OF BERLIOZ AND HIS MUSIC

The music of Berlioz has always been the most controversial aspect of him, of course. There are those who say he is shallow, that his reliance on extra-musical programmes show a sense of compositional weakness, and that he is an oddball who wrote music in a brash, French way with no sense of subtlety. Others say his music had great influence to others, that his daring new discoveries made the music of the composers of the future possible, and in a way both views would be right. If anything, there is probably no-one who had more influence on the development of an orchestra in such a short time. With the Symphonie Fantastique he opened new musical paths never before heard. And not only is that work remarkable as a wild, psychedelic, opium-induced nightmare in its depiction of passions, love, and death, but that it was written by a 28 year old young man, only three years after the death of Beethoven. It is one of the most impressive first symphonies by anybody, standing alongside Mahler's and Brahms' comparative efforts. The criticisms of his use of programmatic ideas as shallow are sometimes accurate, but that would be ignoring Berlioz's motivations for using them. Instead of someone like Liszt, Berlioz had a firm conviction in these ideas that they added to the drama of the music rather than detracted from it.

Stylistically Berlioz was extremely versatile. Most people usually associate him with the large scale and extremely bombastic works like the Symphonie Fantastique, the liturgically massive Requiem, the Te Deum with its likewise massive orchestra and chorus, and the five-hour opera Les Troyens. But not many would associate the composer as a subtle one that is amply in evidence in many pieces, pieces like the very enchanting Le Enfance du Christ (Childhood of Christ), the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette, and the song-cycle Les nuits d'été, that contain some of the most subtle, ingenious and outright beautiful music ever written (the "Spectre de la Rose" from the latter work is wonderfully chilling).

But if anything we can all agree on, is that Berlioz was an extremely talented orchestrator. Berlioz never wrote music with a single instrument in mind (he only played the flute and guitar, but not piano), rather he preferred to handle the entire orchestra as one instrument. When Wagner heard the Roméo et Juliette symphony he was amazed at the possibilites that you could use the orchestra for. When the Symphonie Fantastique appeared it already featured a much expanded orchestra that featured all kinds of orchestrational effects never heard or imagined before. The Grande Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale utilized nothing but a brass band, but did it in such an original way as to transcend the ensemble it was written for. His Traite Général l'Instrumentation (General treatise on instrumentation) has been the most influental guide to the use of an orchestra even to this day.

Ironically for Berlioz, the one area where he did not have much success was in opera, the area which he considered as his number one genre. He had great admiration towards Gluck and saw his sense of drama to be perfection, but rarely did he find much echo for his attempts from his colleagues. His first real opera Les Francs-Juges was never finished and only the overture is still in existence; Benvenuto Cellini was accepted with only moderate results; his magnum opus Les Troyens was the biggest disappointment of his life since nobody wanted to have something of this scale performed despite Berlioz considering it to be the summation of his entire career; and Béatrice et Bénédict came too late to save anything. This is something of a weakness on Berlioz's part in never wanting to forsake Paris where his music was not appreciated, despite he had several offers on remarkable positions in different countries. He often felt like he was just preaching to the idiots and the deaf and identifying himself with the romantic heroes of Byron's Harold and Goethe's Faust which in turn translated to semi-autobiographical pieces of music (the artist in Symphonie Fantastique, Harold in Harold en Italie, Faust in La Damnation de Faust). He was a romantic of Heathcliffian magnitude who saw in himself the natural follower of Beethoven, but was too original in the wrong place to find the resonance he wanted.

OF BERLIOZ AND HIS TRAVELS

Berlioz did a lot of travelling during his life and in many instances he was better accepted than in his homeland. His first major venture to Italy after winning the Prix de Rome, however, was not the best of experiences, not least for the fact that he had to basically put his career on hold for a year while he could have cultivated his fame the Symphonie Fantastique had brought him (and indeed he didn't do much composing there rather than just made long walks all over the countryside). The Italian orchestras were particularly annoying to him as their instruments were crumbling apart and the players were dire, that attacked on the delicate nerves of the composer used to hearing high-class playing in Paris. The countryside itself at that time was dangerous with deceases and brigands roaming in the mountains ready to jump at you any time. But his stay was fruitful enough to offer inspiration for the symphony Harold en Italie (originally to be a viola concerto for Paganini) and the opera Benvenuto Cellini, both utilizing personal experiences to their advantage. His Mémoires again gives many colourful evocations of his stay there, which make for infinitely fascinating and entertaining reading.

His other travels centered more on tours all over Europe performing mostly his own works, and it was on these travels that he gained the most praise. His avid helper Franz Liszt did much to promote Berlioz's music in Germany, even holding the first ever German performance of Benvenuto Cellini and organized a Berlioz Week at one point. Likewise his travels to London, Prague, Hungary and Vienna saw much acclaim bestowed upon him (Hungary in particular proved enthusiastic as his arrangement of the national Rákóczy March caused quite a patriotic stir on a political level that it never was supposed to). In fact the only real moments when his music was not as well received was when he wrote La Damnation de Faust that incited furious comments of how the composer had taken such liberties with Goethe's text, such as placing the events in Hungary, though in reality it really wasn't Goethe Berlioz was looking for his inspiration. But nowhere was his reception perhaps greater than in Russia where he visited during the end of his life in 1867. His reception was extremely enthusiastic and embracing, and if ever Berlioz had cause to feel that he had at least made a name for himself, it was then when applauses and shouts for encores ringed for minutes on end.

OF BERLIOZ AND RELIGION

Berlioz was never a really devout believer in religion, though he felt very fondly of his Roman Catholic upbringing. But he never did profess to see God as some kind of a deity or object of worship. As just about everything else in his life, he considered religion within the poetic and dramatic contexts of his general outlook on life. In this outlook God and faith became something far beyond the institutionalised religions that he felt supressed real faith. He had a deep dislike towards protestantism and particularly puritanism that Luther epitomised, he hated the sort of teachings of the Old Testament that led to religious wars and often ridiculed provincial liturgical practices. He was strongly attracted towards atheism, but still firmly believed in an afterlife and a soul. If anything he had a strongly Beethovenian admiration towards nature, which resulted in his romantic worship of the beautiful in nature and in art. These ideas can also be heard in his music where the religious thoughts alternate between the commonness of church practices and his own brand of devoted romanticism. His ridicule to religion is well in evidence in the finale of the Symphonie Fantastique which presents a funeral as a hellish orgy, where the traditional Dies Irae melody is transformed into a grotesque parody of itself (much like a country performance of the theme would sound). Also his setting of The Damnation of Faust ended with Faust falling in hell amid a pandemonium of devils singing in a hellish language their prases to Mephistopheles (this is juxtaposed with the angelic chorus of his lover Marguerite going to heaven).

In the other end of the scale Berlioz was capable of expressing the most deeply devoted thoughts just as well as the more grotesque ones. The composer's fame with religiously-influenced music rests almost solely on his large scale catholic Requiem and Te Deum. The former in particular carries the fame of being a terribly theatric Requiem far removed from the Classical Requiems, but this is a misconception. This has mostly raised out of the immense apocalyptical carnage in the Tuba mirum section where four brass bands, chorus and eight timpani shake the church with biblical wrath, but the rest of the work (save for perhaps Rex Tremendae and Lacrymosa) is very restrained in tone and dramtcially poetic without being garish. Likewise his music for such works as the Childhood of Christ (a good example that Berlioz's music is not all brass and bombast, being lyrically transparent through and through), many moments in the Te Deum, the last scene of Roméo, and even his first major work, the Messe Solennelle, are more restrained in nature than being merely mindless bombast.

OF BERLIOZ AND HIS LATER LIFE

Berlioz's creative life can be seen as concluding with the disappointing reception of the opera Les Troyens. The composer basically put all his hopes on this work that echoed the grand operas of Gluck and Spontini with the poetic ideals of Virgil's classic story of the Trojan War. Lasting nearly five hours, it was a massive undertaking, but one Berlioz felt was the grand culmination of his entire career. But Paris was not enthusiastic and despite Berlioz's efforts, the only place where he could even get it performed was the ill-equipped Théâtre-lyrique, totally wrong for a large scale work like this. Also the immense length of the piece was too much and it had to be cut down into two parts, with only the latter half being performed in Berlioz's lifetime (it was not until 2003 that the entire work was first performed uncut in Paris), and ironically the only piece that was at least liked, the wonderful "Royal Hunt and Storm", had to be dropped due to the difficulties in staging this interlude in the middle. This failure crushed Berlioz's self esteem and the only major work he completed after Troyens was the charmingly delightful small lyric opera Béatrice et Bénédict after Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing in 1862. Ironically, despite a lifelong antipathy towards his art from the Parisian institutions, most notably the Conservatoire, he was appointed as the librarian of the Conservatoire library in 1850 and later on even served in many musical evaluations, unconceivable when he was a student himself.

In 1865 he added a coda to his Mémoirs (originally finished around 1850) where he recounts his reunion with Estelle and the dark moment when he had to oversee the removal of Harriet's remains to another cemetery as the older one was being demolished. Later on during the same year of 1864 he found out that another mistress of his, Amélie, who had come after Marie's death, had died six months ago, despite being told it was but two weeks. But the greatest shock he experienced came in 1867 when his beloved son Louis died suddenly of yellow fever in Havana while serving on a merchant ship. The message only reached him six months after the event. This left Berlioz devastated, leaving him nothing more than a shadow of his former self. During his concerts in Russia he was already an old man at the age of 64, beaten down by the numerous misfortunes over such a short time. On March 8, 1869 he died at his home at Rue de Calais, No.4, and he was then buried beside his two wives in the Cimetière Montmartre.

OF BERLIOZ AND HIS LEGACY

Berlioz is still considered as somewhat of an oddball by France. Following his death, his Mémoirs were published the following year according to his wishes. Apart from a few instances of commemorative articles and unveiling of a statue of him in 1886 at the Square Vintimille, Berlioz's legacy remained somewhat questionable. The composer was very influental to many who followed; Liszt was so excited by his music that it had great influence with the direction he took as a composer and not just a piano virtuoso, and while their relations did cool in the strife between Wagner and Berlioz in the 1850s, there is no denying that Liszt probably wouldn't have gotten where he was without Berlioz; Wagner was very impressed with the Roméo and Juliette symphony and it opened completely new directions for him to explore both dramatically as well as orchestrationally, although the two really didn't get along all that well (the final fall out came as Wagner thought Les Troyens was boring and old fashioned, while Berlioz thought the contemporary Tristan und Isolde was messy and just bad musically); Tchaikovsky was very impressed and his symphonies bare many similarities to Berlioz's practices (most notably the Manfred Symphony); and many others have learned much from Berlioz's Treatise on Orchestration such as Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, while many of the things presented in that book are still relevant today.

But France still thought of him as just too messy and unconformed to pay too much attention to him (Debussy said he'd much rather mud-wrestle with Wagner than listen to Berlioz). Therefore it may come as no surprise that the greatest champions of his music are not French, but rather mostly German and British such as Sir Colin Davis, who is considered as the ultimate champion of Berlioz's music since the 1960s. Les Troyens was first staged in its entirety as it was originally supposed to in Covent Garden in 1958, a hundred years after being completed. His accomplishments are still considered as questionable, his music an acquired taste, his talent perverse, and in France not many still consider him a remarkable composer that he by all definition should be. During his 200th birthday celebrations in 2003, a suggestion that his remains be moved to the Panthéon was shot down by President Chirac over a political dispute over his worthiness as a symbol of the glory of France when compared with other noted French artists. Whether this attitude will ever change is pretty vague, but if anything, Berlioz will probably forever divide opinions on whether he was just a colourful hack or a true genius as worthy as Beethoven and Brahms are.

Witty to the end, his last words were: "Enfin, ou va jouer ma musique" (At last, they will now play my music).

For the best insight into Berlioz's life it is suggested to read his Mémoirs, translated by the eminent Berlioz historian David Cairns in 1969. Staying true to the composer's original text, it is a great insight into the mind of one of the foremost Romantics and see the world with the eyes of one. He's witty, humorous, and unabashedly exaggerated style of writing makes for one of the most interesting and entertaining memoirs-type books I've ever seen, and I highly recommend everybody interested to read it if they get the opportunity. (The Camelot Press, ISBN 575-00181-X)

© berlioz, 2006