Hector Berlioz

• 1. Introduction

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  Hector Berlioz was born on the 11th of December 1803 in the commune of La Cote-Saint-Andre, in south-eastern France, the son of a physician who had never heard of him becoming a composer. His father was a progressive, agnostic doctor credited as the first European to practise and write about acupuncture. His mother was a strict Roman Catholic. Between those two poles, Berlioz grew up a free-thinker who refused to follow any established rule he did not first find convincing. He never studied the piano. He could barely play one. He later argued this freed him from what he called the tyranny of keyboard habits. That is a striking claim from a man who would go on to invent the modern orchestra. The questions that follow are these: how does a man trained for medicine become one of the most polarising composers in history? How does a symphony provoke both wild ovation and the accusation that its author was, in one critic's memorable phrase, a tipsy chimpanzee? And what did it cost him to be wholly himself?

• 2. A Mind Shaped by Gluck

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  Within days of arriving in Paris in late September 1821, the seventeen-year-old Berlioz went to the Opera. Within three weeks he saw Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride, and it thrilled him. What struck him was not Gluck's melody but his use of the orchestra to carry the drama. That insight would define Berlioz's entire creative life. He began visiting the Paris Conservatoire library between his medical lectures, seeking out Gluck's scores and making copies of parts of them. By the end of 1822 he sought formal composition lessons from Jean-Francois Le Sueur, director of the Royal Chapel and professor at the Conservatoire, who took him on as a private pupil. In August 1823 Berlioz published his first piece of journalism, a letter to the journal Le Corsaire arguing that all of Rossini's operas put together could not compare to even a few bars of Gluck, Spontini, or Le Sueur. His loyalties were declared early and they never shifted. In 1826 he was admitted as a formal student to the Conservatoire, studying composition under Le Sueur and counterpoint with Anton Reicha. That same year he made the first of four attempts to win France's premier music prize, the Prix de Rome, and was eliminated in the first round.

• 3. Harriet and the Idee Fixe

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  In 1827 Berlioz attended productions of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre de l'Odeon, performed by Charles Kemble's touring company. He barely spoke English at the time, but he was overwhelmed. The plays ignited a lifelong passion for Shakespeare. Kemble's leading lady was the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, and Berlioz's biographer Hugh Macdonald describes his immediate response as nothing less than emotional derangement. He pursued her obsessively. She refused even to meet him. She remained beyond his reach for years. His desire took another form instead. In December 1830 Berlioz premiered the Symphonie fantastique, a purely orchestral work that follows a young artist who, in the grip of a hopeless passion, poisons himself with opium and hallucinates his own execution. The object of his love appears throughout the symphony as a recurring melodic thread Berlioz called an idee fixe, an obsessive idea. The recurring theme was his idealised portrait of Harriet. Protracted applause followed the premiere, and the press expressed both shock and pleasure. Berlioz's biographer David Cairns calls the concert a landmark not only in the composer's career but in the evolution of the modern orchestra. Franz Liszt attended and later transcribed the entire symphony for piano so that more people could hear it. Harriet herself did not attend that premiere, but she would soon.

• 4. The Price of the Prize

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  On the 29th of July 1830, as street fighting from the July Revolution echoed outside his window, Berlioz finished the last pages of his orchestral score for the Prix de Rome cantata La Mort de Sardanapale. His previous entry, Cléopâtre, had been rejected because conservative judges felt it betrayed dangerous tendencies. For his 1830 submission Berlioz carefully moderated his natural style to meet official approval, and he won. Under the terms of the prize, winners studied for two years at the Villa Medici in Rome. The stay was not happy. Berlioz found Rome, in his own words, the most stupid and prosaic city he knew. He did enjoy meeting Felix Mendelssohn, who was visiting the city, and he made extensive journeys through Italy. His biographer Macdonald notes that the Italian residency gave his music a new colour and glow, sensuous and vivacious, drawn not from Italian painting or music, both of which he scorned, but from the scenery, the sun, and what Macdonald calls an acute sense of locale. Berlioz himself wrote that Harold in Italy drew on the poetic memories formed from his wanderings in Abruzzi. While in Nice on his return journey he wrote the King Lear overture and began Le Retour a la vie, a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique. He arrived back in Paris in November 1832, carrying works shaped by a country he had refused to love.

• 5. Paganini, Failure, and Fortune

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  On the 9th of December 1832 Berlioz presented a concert at the Conservatoire that included a heavily revised Symphonie fantastique. Through a third party he had sent Harriet Smithson an invitation, and she came. Among the musicians present were Liszt, Frederic Chopin, and Niccolo Paganini; writers including Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and George Sand were in the audience. Berlioz and Smithson finally met. They were married at the British Embassy in Paris on the 3rd of October 1833, against strong opposition from both families. On the 14th of August 1834 their only child, Louis-Clement-Thomas, was born. That same year Paganini, looking for a work to show off a Stradivarius viola he had acquired, asked Berlioz to write him something suitable. Berlioz composed Harold in Italy, but Paganini found the solo part too reticent. The violist Chretien Urhan played the premiere in November 1834. Berlioz's opera Benvenuto Cellini, worked on from 1834 until 1837, had only four complete performances. Its failure, Berlioz said, closed the doors of the Opera to him for the rest of his career. Then something unexpected happened. Shortly after that failure, Paganini came on to the platform at a Harold in Italy performance, knelt before Berlioz, and kissed his hand. A few days later Berlioz received a cheque from him for 20,000 francs. The gift allowed Berlioz to pay off debts, give up criticism temporarily, and write the dramatic symphony Romeo et Juliette, premiered in November 1839. Among those in the audiences was the young Wagner, who later drew on it when composing Tristan und Isolde.

• 6. Orchestration as Invention

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  Richard Strauss wrote that Berlioz invented the modern orchestra. That is not a metaphor. Berlioz took instruments used only for special effects and introduced them as regular members of the ensemble: the harp, the cor anglais, the bass clarinet, and the valve trumpet, as Macdonald lists them. His Treatise on Instrumentation, which began as a series of sixteen articles published in the Revue et gazette musicale from November 1841, became a standard reference throughout the 19th century. When Strauss was commissioned to revise it in 1905, he added new material but left Berlioz's original text unchanged. A new English translation appeared in 1948. The Requiem, first performed at Les Invalides in December 1837, calls for sixteen timpani, quadruple woodwind, and twelve horns. Berlioz held a special affection for it: he wrote that if all his works but one were threatened with destruction, he would plead for the Messe des morts. Pierre Boulez later complained that there are awkward harmonies in Berlioz that make one scream. The pianist Charles Rosen identified something more precise: Berlioz often sets the climax of his melodies with the most emphatic chord as a triad in root position, and often a tonic chord where the listener expects a dominant. The second phrase of the Symphonie fantastique's idee fixe is his example, famous, Rosen writes, for its shock to classical sensibilities. Julian Rushton, writing in his 1983 book The Musical Language of Berlioz, concludes that Berlioz's way is neither architectural nor developmental, but illustrative, a point of view belonging to a distinctly French musical aesthetic.

• 7. Les Troyens and the Late Years

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  During a German tour in 1856, Liszt and his companion Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein encouraged Berlioz's tentative idea for an opera based on Virgil's Aeneid, the same poem that had moved him to tears as a boy. He wrote his own libretto and worked on the score for two years between conducting engagements. In 1858 he was elected to the Institut de France. He completed Les Troyens that year and then spent five years trying to have it staged. The five-act, five-hour opera was too large for the Opera's management to accept. The only version Berlioz could arrange was a truncated staging of the final three acts at the Theatre-Lyrique in November 1863. During the run of 22 performances, number after number was cut. Berlioz wrote no more music after this. His wife Marie Recio had died suddenly in June 1862. He had lost both sisters. His son Louis, a captain in the merchant navy, was rarely home. He sought out his first love, Estelle, now a widow aged 67, calling on her in September 1864, visiting her in three successive summers, and writing to her nearly every month for the rest of his life. In 1867 he learned that Louis had died in Havana of yellow fever. A planned concert tour to Russia followed; on the way back he fell on rocks by the shore at Nice, possibly because of a stroke. He convalesced in Paris and died at his house in the Rue de Calais on the 8th of March 1869, at the age of 65. He was buried in Montmartre Cemetery with his two wives, who were exhumed and re-buried beside him. A professional staging of the original, uncut Les Troyens in French at Covent Garden in 1969 marked the centenary of his death and is now recognised as a milestone in his rehabilitation.

• 8. The Long Reappraisal

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  The lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong called Berlioz's music variously flatulent, rubbish, and the work of a tipsy chimpanzee. Debussy called him a monster, not a musician at all. The 1904 edition of Grove described his music as the work of a vivid imagination striving to explain itself in a tongue it never perfectly understood. The 1954 edition of Grove still judged his harmonic procedures clumsy and his pen without pliancy. David Cairns dismissed that 1954 article as an astonishing anthology of all the nonsense that has ever been talked about Berlioz, and by the 1960s it read, as Cairns put it, as a quaint survival from a vanished age. The turn began earlier. In 1950 the scholar Jacques Barzun argued that Berlioz had always been praised by artistic peers including Schumann, Wagner, Cesar Franck, and Modest Mussorgsky, but that the public had heard little of his music until recordings became widely available. The introduction of the LP record after the Second World War changed what audiences could judge for themselves. Hugh Macdonald was appointed in 1967 as the inaugural general editor of the New Berlioz Edition published by Barenreiter; 26 volumes appeared between 1967 and 2006 under his editorship. Cairns published a two-volume, 1500-page study of the composer in 1989 and 1999, described by Grove as one of the masterpieces of modern biography. The collection of Berlioz's letters, begun by Julien Tiersot, was finally completed in 2016-80 years after Tiersot's death. The Symphonie fantastique alone has amassed 96 recorded versions catalogued by the British Hector Berlioz website, from Gabriel Pieren's pioneering 1928 recording to versions by Beecham, Pierre Monteux, Herbert von Karajan, and more recently Yannick Nezet-Seguin and Francois-Xavier Roth.