Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz (born December 11, 1803, La Côte-Saint-André, France—died March 8, 1869, Paris) was a French composer, critic, and conductor of the Romantic period, known largely for his Symphonie fantastique (1830), the choral symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839), and the dramatic piece La Damnation de Faust (1846). His last years were marked by fame abroad and hostility at home.

Early career

The birthplace of Berlioz was a village about 35 miles (56 km) northwest of Grenoble in the French Alps. France was at war; the schools were disrupted; and Berlioz received his education from his father, an enlightened and cultured physician, who gave him his first lessons in music as well as in Latin. But, like many composers, Berlioz received in his early years little formal training in music. He worked out for himself the elements of harmony and by his 12th year was composing for local chamber-music groups. With help from performers, he learned to play the flute and the guitar, becoming a virtuoso on the latter.

In 1821 his father sent him to Paris to study medicine, and for a year he followed his courses faithfully enough to obtain his first degree in science. He took every opportunity to go to the Paris-Opéra, however, where he studied, score in hand, the whole repertory, in which the works of Gluck had for him the most appeal and authority. His musical vocation had become so clear in his mind that he contrived to be accepted as a pupil of Jean-François Lesueur, professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. This led to disagreements between Berlioz and his parents that embittered nearly eight years of his life. He persevered, took the obligatory courses at the Conservatoire, and in 1830 won the Prix de Rome, having received second prize in an earlier competition. These successes pacified his family but were, in a sense, incidental to his career, for in the same year he had finished and obtained a performance of his first great score, which is also a seminal work in 19th-century music, the Symphonie fantastique.

It was in some respects unfortunate that, instead of being able to follow up this success, Berlioz was required, under the terms of his prize, to spend three years abroad, two of them in Italy. During his long Paris apprenticeship, he had experienced the “revelation” of two modern musicians, Beethoven and Weber, and of two great poets, Shakespeare and Goethe. He had meanwhile fallen in love, at a distance, with Harriet Smithson, a Shakespearean actress who had taken Paris by storm; and, on the rebound from this rather one-sided attachment, he had become engaged to a brilliant and beautiful pianist, Camille Moke (later Mme Pleyel). In leaving Paris, Berlioz was not only leaving a flirtatious fiancée and the artistic environment that had stimulated his powers; he was also leaving the opportunity to demonstrate what his genius saw that modern French music should be. The public was content with the “Paris school,” dating back to the 1780s, and there is evidence that all Europe (including the Vienna of Beethoven and Schubert) accepted the productions of André Grétry, Étienne Méhul, Luigi Cherubini, and their followers as leading the musical world.

Berlioz wanted to bring forward the work of Weber and Beethoven (including the last quartets) and add contributions of his own. He also preached, for the sake of dramatic expression in music, a return to the master of the stage, Gluck, whose works he knew by heart. These three musicians were all in some sense dramatists, and to Berlioz music must first and foremost be dramatically expressive. This doctrine he had begun to expound in his first musical reviews, as early as 1823, and, with the sharpness and strength of an early vision, it remained the artistic creed of his mature years. When one understands its intellectual and intuitive basis, one understands also the reasons for his dynamic career. What may look like self-seeking—the unceasing effort to have his music played—was, in fact, the dedication of his tremendous energies to a cause, often at the expense of his own creative work. The result of his many journeys to Germany, Belgium, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary was that he taught the leading orchestras of Europe a new style and, through them, taught a new idiom to the young composers and critics who flocked wherever he went.

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Composers & Their Music

Before these “campaigns” began, however, Berlioz had his time of reflection in Italy. He wrote in his Mémoires (1870) how unproductive he was after the rich output of the Paris years, which had brought forth an oratorio, numerous cantatas, two dozen songs, a mass, part of an opera, two overtures, a fantasia on Shakespeare’s Tempest, and eight scenes from Goethe’s Faust, as well as the Symphonie fantastique. Even in Italy, however, Berlioz filled notebooks, met the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, made a lifelong friend of Mendelssohn, and tramped the hills with his guitar over his shoulder, playing for the peasants and banditti whose meals he shared. The impressions gathered in Italy remained a source of both musical and dramatic inspiration down to the last of his works, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict (first performed 1862). Meanwhile, his love affair stagnating and his impatience with life at the Villa Medici in Rome becoming acute, he returned to France after 18 months and forfeited part of his prize.