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Introduction - Biography
Biography from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition Berlioz, (Louis-) Hector (b La Côte-Saint-André, Isère, 11 Dec 1803; d Paris, 8 March 1869). French composer. He stands as the leading musician of his age in a country, France, whose principal artistic endeavour was then literary, in an art, music, whose principal pioneers were then German. In many senses the Romantic movement found its fullest embodiment in him, yet he had deep Classical roots and stood apart from many manifestations of that movement. His life presents the archetypal tragic struggle of new ideas for acceptance, to which he gave his full exertions as composer, critic and conductor. And though there were many who perceived greatness in his music from the beginning, his genius only came to full recognition in the 20th century. 1. 1803–1821. At about the age of ten Berlioz briefly attended an infant seminary at La Côte, but thereafter his education was entirely in his father’s hands. He took most keenly to French and Latin literature and to geography, especially travel books, which implanted in him a longing for distant, sometimes exotic shores that his later travels around Europe scarcely satisfied. Of Latin authors his favourite was Virgil, and in his Mémoires (the major source for knowledge and understanding of his life) he recounted how his father’s reading of the episode of Dido and Aeneas reduced him to tears. His father also gave him rudimentary instruction on the flageolet, and he later learnt the flute with a local teacher, Imbert, and the guitar with another, Dorant. There is no doubt that his ability on the flute and guitar quickly became more than adequate, and it satisfied not only social demand but the deep-rooted sensitivity to music of which Berlioz had first become aware as a small boy when attending Mass. A tune from Dalayrac’s Nina, pressed to the service of religion, first evoked a sense of wonderment mingling with an ardent but short-lived religious sense. He never studied the piano and never learnt to play more than a few chords. Berlioz also linked his first steps in music, learning the flageolet, with his boyhood passion for Estelle Duboeuf, when he was 12 and she 18. He called her his stella montis, associating her with the mountains behind Meylan where she lived and with Florian’s Estelle et Némorin which he had already ‘read and reread a hundred times’. He was teased for his admiration from afar, but it proved to be deeper than anyone suspected. He found a copy of Rameau’s Traité de l’harmonie at home and also procured Catel’s Traité d’harmonie. These provided the basis for a knowledge of harmony, learnt entirely without reference to a keyboard, with which he began to compose more ambitiously, probably at the age of 13 or 14. He wrote a potpourri on Italian melodies, and then two quintets for flute and strings, all now lost but for a melody from one of the quintets that became the second subject of the overture to Les francs-juges. Similarly, a setting of one of Florian’s poems Je vais donc quitter pour jamais made at this time survives as the first theme in the opening section of the Symphonie fantastique. ‘It seemed to me exactly right for expressing the overpowering sadness of a young heart caught in the toils of a hopeless love.’ He made copies of popular romances by Dalayrac, Boieldieu, Berton and others, sometimes with his own guitar accompaniments, and his own romances were in the same mould. In 1819, when he was 15, he wrote to two (and probably more) Paris music publishers offering a sextet and some songs with piano accompaniment, but none seem to have been published at that time. When he reached 17 a decision had to be made about his career, and
though an irresistible instinct drew Berlioz to music, his father’s
wish that he should follow him into the medical profession prevailed,
and he was sent to Paris to the Ecole de Médecine, having obtained
his bachelor’s degree in Grenoble in March 1821. At this stage
his horizons were still narrow; his knowledge of the world was more
literary than real, and his profoundest impressions were probably
the child’s absorption of his natural surroundings and of the
echoes of the Napoleonic convulsion. Much of his experience was vicarious,
for he found in Bernardin de St Pierre and Chateaubriand an outlet
for his still dormant capacity for intense feeling. In music only
the slightest works by minor composers were known to him and he had
never seen a full score; Pleyel’s quartets were the most sophisticated
music he had heard. In physique he was of middle height, with a mass
of fiery, tawny hair; his eyes were blue and deep set, and a distinctive
aquiline nose surmounted wide, thin lips. 2. 1821–1830. Even before Berlioz’s departure from La Côte his aversion to medicine was plain. Become a doctor! Study anatomy! Dissect! Take part in horrible operations – instead of giving myself body and soul to music, sublime art whose grandeur I was beginning to perceive! Forsake the highest heaven for the wretchedest regions of earth, the immortal spirits of poetry and love and their divinely inspired strains for dirty hospital orderlies, dreadful dissecting-room attendants, hideous corpses, the screams of patients, the groans and rattling breath of the dying! No, no! It seemed to me the reversal of the whole natural order of my existence. It was monstrous. It could not happen. Yet it did. But medicine was fighting a losing battle against the overpowering strength of Berlioz’s musical impulse now inflamed a hundred times more strongly by the musical experience and opportunity offered by the capital, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. Within a month of his arrival he began to attend performances at the Opéra. Gluck, whose Iphigénie en Tauride was one of the first operas he heard, made a deep and lasting impression and remained the composer he admired most wholeheartedly of all. He also heard operas by Salieri, Sacchini, Méhul, Spontini and Boieldieu, a repertory that supplied a stylistic basis for his own initial attempts at large-scale composition. There survive copies in his own hand of extracts from Gluck’s operas made in 1822 in the Conservatoire library, which he frequented as often as his studies allowed, but he soon felt the need to supplement his musical technique; at the end of 1822 he gained an introduction to Le Sueur through a pupil, Gérono, and was admitted to his class. By this time he had attempted for the first time a work for full orchestra, the cantata Le cheval arabe on a text by Millevoye (now lost). Six romancesfor one or two voices with piano had appeared separately in print since his arrival in Paris, but one effect of Le Sueur’s tutelage was that Berlioz published no further music for about six years, concentrating instead on larger works, with orchestral accompaniments. In 1823 he composed an opera on Florian’s Estelle et Némorin referring to childhood memories and doubtless childhood melodies too. This, like the two works that followed – a scene for bass from Saurin’s Beverley and the Latin oratorio Le passage de la mer rouge – was later burnt, on Berlioz’s confession. The first important work to have survived is the Messe solennelle composed for the church of St Roch in 1824. A first rehearsal under Valentino on 27 December 1824 was a fiasco, but a successful performance the following July, under the same conductor, restored Berlioz’s confidence in himself and strengthened his resolve to be, in Le Sueur’s words, ‘no doctor or apothecary but a great composer’. Since his abandonment of medicine he had had to face the entrenched opposition of his parents and their curtailment of his funds. His father had always assumed that his son would inherit the responsibilities of the family estate in which he had invested so much of his own energies, and resisted any suggestion that Berlioz's career might take him elsewhere. Family disputes persisted for years and the visits he paid to La Côte only deepened the estrangement. With his father’s allowance reduced and intermittently refused, Berlioz was forced to borrow from his friends, and he was to suffer severe hardship for at least five years. He depended on whatever sources were at hand – a few pupils, a short period as a chorus singer at the Théâtre des Nouveautés, and occasional articles for the press, the beginnings of what was later to be his principal source of income. His closest friend at this period was a law student with literary inclinations, Humbert Ferrand, who supplied the text for La révolution grecque, set to music in 1825, and also for an opera Les francs-juges (1826) of which six fragments and the overture remain. It owed much to his teacher Le Sueur but also reflected the dark colours and sinister tones of Weber’s Der Freischütz(introduced to Paris as Robin des bois in 1824). Although Les francs-juges was completed, none of Berlioz’s efforts to secure a performance succeeded, and after at least two attempts to rewrite it, he discarded or re-used some of it in later works, notably the Marche des gardes, incorporated in the Symphonie fantastique as the ‘Marche au supplice’ in 1830. In 1826 Berlioz entered the Conservatoire: here he was in Le Sueur’s class for composition, which he had been attending for some time, and Reicha’s class for counterpoint and fugue. Les francs-juges and the overture to Waverley, which followed it, revealed a growing individuality and a marked confidence in his own powers, especially in the handling of instruments. In 1826 he also entered for the Prix de Rome for the first time, getting no further than the preliminary round. The following year, though, he passed the first test and entered en loge for the first of four times to compose the cantata prescribed by the regulations of the competition. La mort d’Orphée, the cantata set in 1827, was declared unplayable by the judges (though Berlioz had it played in rehearsal in 1828 with some satisfaction). For the 1828 competition he composed Herminie, which contains the melody later used as the idée fixe in the Symphonie fantastique, and won second prize. In 1829 he wrote the most individual and dramatic of these cantatas, La mort de Cléopâtre, and no prize was awarded, probably to avoid bestowing official approval on a composer who ‘betrayed such dangerous tendencies’. At the fourth attempt, in 1830, Berlioz was finally successful, although only a fragment of the cantata, La mort de Sardanapale, survives. His tactic had been to restrain his more individual mode of expression in order to provide a conventionally acceptable style. Meanwhile the emotional and artistic elements of his being had been set alight by a series of thunderstrokes. The capacity for absorbing powerful external impressions and transmuting them into high artistic form placed him in the avant garde of the generation of 1830, and implanted in the soil of his imagination the seed of great works, many of them to remain beneath the surface of realization for many years. The first was the simultaneous impact of Shakespeare and the actress Harriet Smithson on 11 September 1827. On that day Berlioz attended Hamlet presented by an English company at the Odéon theatre, with Charles Kemble playing Hamlet and Miss Smithson playing Ophelia. ‘The impression made on my heart and mind by her extraordinary talent, nay her dramatic genius, was equalled only by the havoc wrought in me by the poet she so nobly interpreted.’ Though the performance (of the Garrick version) was in English, of which Berlioz knew virtually nothing at that time, he grasped the grandeur and sublimity of Shakespeare’s language and the richness of its dramatic design, and he joined the ranks of those under Hugo’s leadership who extolled Shakespeare as a challenge to French Classicism and a model for the new Romantic theatre. For Berlioz Shakespeare represented the pinnacle of poetic utterance; his veracity of dramatic expression and freedom from formal constraints picked up direct resonances in Berlioz’s spirit. Shakespeare’s plays were to supply the basis of three major works, Roméo et Juliette, Béatrice et Bénédict and the Roi Lear overture. In addition, there were at least three pieces inspired by Hamlet, a fantasy on The Tempest, and some direct borrowings in Les Troyens. More profoundly Shakespeare provided a framework for the structure of both Roméo et Juliette and Les Troyens and was a source, in the form of dramatic truth, of Berlioz’s fundamental notion of expressive truth. Berlioz was to read and quote Shakespeare avidly for the rest of his life, putting him alongside Virgil in his literary pantheon. This seminal discovery worked itself out more profoundly and more slowly than that of Miss Smithson, whom he referred to as his Ophelia, or Juliet, or Desdemona. His emotional derangement was immediate and violent. For the next two years he was obsessed by her, waiting for her return to Paris, vainly seeking a means to approach her. When in 1830 his love for her eventually turned sour, the accumulation of emotional tension broke out in the Symphonie fantastique, which describes and transmutes into artistic form the artist’s passions, dreams and frustrations. For Berlioz there was no clear distinction between the real Harriet Smithson and the idealized embodiment of Shakespeare’s heroines, so that when, later, he was to secure an introduction to her and ultimately marry her, a relationship that had begun on an ideal level could only spoil in the glare of everyday reality, and the wholly Romantic conjunction of the artist with the ideal woman came to a bitter end. Two further discoveries at this time rank as of supreme importance: in March 1828 Berlioz heard Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Symphonies, played by Habeneck and the Société des Concerts at the Conservatoire. ‘Beethoven opened before me a new world of music, as Shakespeare had revealed a new universe of poetry.’ For the first time his horizons widened from the exclusively vocal genres of opera, cantata and romanceto the expressive potential of pure instrumental music. That Berlioz wrote symphonies at all is entirely due to his obeisance to Beethoven, and the Symphonie fantastique can be seen as a deliberate and conscious attempt to work out dramatic and poetic ideas in the framework of a Beethoven symphony. More important, Berlioz discovered that instrumental music has an expressive and articulative force far more penetrating than vocal setting, a discovery shown palpably in the ‘Scène d’amour’ of Roméo et Juliette, in the Hamlet funeral march, and at certain points in Les Troyens. Just as Berlioz hardly set any of Shakespeare’s poetry to music, similarly Berlioz rarely adopted the precise tone and timbre of Beethoven. He absorbed this impact at a deep level, seeing Beethoven as a supreme dramatist in music, more poet than craftsman. Goethe’s Faust reached Berlioz through Gérard de Nerval’s translation, published in December 1827, and again its impact was profound and immediate. The Faustian conception of man struck numerous echoes in Berlioz’s breast. In a letter of 1828 he described Shakespeare and Goethe as ‘the silent confidants of my suffering; they hold the key to my life’. He went on to say that he had just set the ballad of the King of Thule to music, the first of what were to be eight scenes, settings of the verse portions of Nerval’s translation. The Huit scènes de Faust were published at Berlioz’s expense in the following year, an op.1 of exceptional originality and invention. Each scene bears a quotation from Shakespeare, and each has its appropriate musical setting, varying from the Concert de sylphes for six solo voices and orchestra to the Sérénade in which Mephistopheles is accompanied by a guitar. But despite its remarkable character Berlioz found the work ‘crude and badly written’. He collected all the copies he could and destroyed them. Dimly he may have realized that the music would eventually find its due place in the larger scheme of La damnation de Faust, completed in 1846. Literary influences of a less overwhelming kind were numerous, chief among them being the works of Moore, Scott and Byron. All three inspired compositions. He submerged himself, too, in Chateaubriand, Hoffmann, Fenimore Cooper, and the work of his own compatriots and contemporaries, Hugo, de Vigny, de Musset and Nerval. Later he was to absorb and admire Balzac, Flaubert, and Gautier, whose poems supplied the text of Les nuits d’été. The ferment of Berlioz’s mind in the late 1820s was astonishing. Instead of wilting under a constant onslaught on his sensitivities, he broke out in gusts of creative energy. The Waverley overture, the Huit scènes de Faust, the nine settings of Thomas Moore (the Irlandecollection), composed in 1829, and above all the Symphonie fantastique, composed in early 1830, are testimony to this. He was active too as a proponent of his own music. The Messe solennelle had been played at St Roch in 1825 and 1827, and on 26 May 1828 Berlioz gave his first orchestral concert in Paris. His intention was to bring himself to the attention of the public, especially Harriet Smithson, and he succeeded in his aim in that the press, particularly the influential Fétis, was favourable. Much of his time in the next 15 years was devoted to planning, organizing and, after 1835, conducting his own concerts in Paris, a task that made heavy demands on his energy and usually his purse, but which provided the sole outlet for his orchestral works. His eventual success in winning the Prix de Rome in 1830 was important to him as a means of convincing his parents that his musical bent was serious, as well as a source of income for the next few years. The prize required residence in Italy, but before he left he had important concerts to give in Paris. At the prize-giving ceremony at the institute on 30 October his cantata La mort de Sardanapale (with an additional conflagration scene written after the prize had been awarded) misfired completely. His fantasy (or ‘overture’) on The Tempest for chorus and orchestra was heard for the first time on 7 November at the Opéra and on 5 December the Symphonie fantastiquereceived its first performance in a concert of Berlioz’s works conducted by Habeneck. Liszt, who was present, made Berlioz’s acquaintance on that occasion (fig.2). Berlioz’s reputation as a composer of startling originality was by now confirmed and his progress in the musical world of Paris was not to be furthered by enforced removal to Italy. He made several requests to be exempted from going, giving as his reasons his need to pursue his career in Paris and the state of his health, which had certainly not been good. A more pressing reason, in Berlioz’s mind, was his attachment to Camille Moke, a 19-year-old pianist of exceptional gifts whom he had met earlier in the year at a school where she taught the piano and he the guitar. She replaced the unresponsive Miss Smithson in his affections and their ardent affair led even to betrothal on the eve of his departure for Italy. 3. 1831–1842. Berlioz spent a month at La Côte-Saint-André, where his parents were at last delighted with their son’s success. At the back of his mind he had a large-scale composition that was to haunt him for a number of years, while his immediate thoughts were entirely with Camille, already, according to Ferdinand Hiller (her previous attachment), cooling in her affections. His journey to Italy and the 15 months he spent there were crucially formative. His mind was constantly alive to the impressions, both inspiring and disappointing, of the country and the people, their customs and way of life. He was supposed to draw inspiration from the relics of classical antiquity. These certainly intrigued him, especially where they touched upon Virgil, but his musical output was relatively small and haphazard, and his official submissions from Rome were not especially remarkable. Italy was nonetheless to work upon his music in more gradual fashion, with far-reaching influence on his style. Henceforth there was a new colour and glow in his music, both sensuous and vivacious. These derive not from Italian art, which touched him little, or Italian music, which he despised, but from the scenery and the sun, and from his acute sense of locale. Harold en Italie, Benvenuto Cellini and Roméo et Juliette are the most obvious expressions of his response to Italy: both Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict reflect the warmth and stillness of the Mediterranean, as well as its vivacity and force. Berlioz’s descriptions of Italy in the Mémoires and the abundant accounts of his travels in letters to his friends and family are wonderfully evocative; he seems here to have discovered his gifts as a writer. In Italy he came face to face with experiences he had previously only read about or idealized. Byronism, so fashionable at that time, became reality as he encountered brigands, corsairs, revolutionaries, lazzaroni and pifferari, and as he sampled the harshness of a storm at sea or the Carnival in Rome or sleeping in the open air in the mountains. He met sailors, peasants, sculptors and travellers, but, with the notable exception of Mendelssohn, few musicians. The Villa Medici at Rome housed the institute prizewinners under the tutelage of Horace Vernet, but Berlioz greatly disliked the city: ‘Rome is the most stupid and prosaic city I know: it is no place for anyone with head or heart’. Florence, on the other hand, he adored: ‘Everything about it delights me, its name, its climate, its river, its palaces, its air, the style and elegance of its inhabitants, its surroundings, everything, I love it, love it’. At Rome he composed little, mostly because of the stifling atmosphere of the Villa, but on his travels he achieved much more. Three weeks after his arrival in Rome Berlioz set off back to France, jeopardizing his pension, in order to discover why he had heard nothing from Camille. At Florence, where he suffered a serious attack of quinsy, he learned the truth: that she had abandoned him for a new and more prosperous suitor, Camille Pleyel, the piano manufacturer. In a torrent of rage and wounded pride, Berlioz determined to return to Paris to kill the two Camilles, her mother and finally himself. Although he reached Nice, his resolve wavered and his better sense persuaded him to give his passions time to cool. Vernet was prepared to pardon him; Berlioz was prepared to spare his victims. The experience was traumatic, with emotional recovery very closely related to the recovery of his health. He felt that he had ‘survived’, and that he could live again to compose the music still dormant in his mind. Here was born Le retour à la vie, a half-literary, half-musical work that folded a variety of experiences together under the title ‘mélologue’ taken from Thomas Moore. Much of the text reflected thoughts and ideas found in his letters of the time, while the music was almost entirely drawn from works written earlier in Paris. Although the work was always designed as a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique and referred directly to Harriet Smithson, it was a different unrequited love that originated it. It was not renamed Léliountil its revival in 1855. Resting for three weeks in Nice – the three happiest weeks of his life, Berlioz said – he gave priority to another pressing inspiration, an overture on Shakespeare’s King Lear, which he had read in Florence, and started another on Scott’s Rob Roy. On the return to Rome he worked further on Le retour à la vie and revised the Symphonie fantastique. He moved out of Rome as often as possible, especially to the Abruzzi mountains, Tivoli and Subiaco, where he finished Rob-Roy. Antoine Etex, the sculptor, recalled how he and Berlioz went for long walks together, singing Guillaume Tell, bathing, searching for brigands and playing practical jokes. In September Berlioz went to Naples, visited Pompeii and the island of Nisida, and then returned to Rome on foot. The only musical product of the rest of his stay in Italy was the song La captive (in its strophic form), written in Subiaco in February 1832. Impatient to get back to Paris and to have his new works performed there, he secured six months’ dispensation and left in May 1832. He was later exempted from the required residence in Germany. After some months at La Côte-Saint-André, he reached Paris in November and immediately organized a concert of his own music, including the revised Symphonie fantastique with its sequel Le retour à la vie. Thinly veiled references to Fétis’s ‘corrections’ of Beethoven symphonies earned Berlioz a bitter notice in the Revue musicale and the animosity of an influential critic, but he was more concerned by the fact that Harriet Smithson was in Paris at the time. Her performances were far from the fashionable success they had been five years earlier, but an intermediary secured her attendance at the concert and subsequently an introduction. Despite their respective accumulated debts and difficulties and objections from both families, especially his own, Berlioz soon proposed marriage. After a bizarre and stormy courtship, they were married on 3 October 1833. It was perhaps characteristic of Berlioz to take his idealized love for his Ophelia to the point of marriage and perhaps, too, no surprise that the marriage was happy for scarcely more than six years. A son, Louis, was born to them in August 1834, and the picture of the young ménage living at the top of Montmartre, where their friends went to visit them, is a touching one. But with a language barrier between them and the strains of temperament and material deprivations always acute, it is hardly surprising that by 1842 or earlier they had drifted apart. Harriet’s last years are a distressing tale of misery and decline, and she died in 1854. Berlioz supported her to the end and retained a warmth of affection for what she had meant to him and for her inspiring qualities as an artist. Berlioz’s career in the 1830s is, despite its astonishing achievements, essentially a tragic one. Conscious of his own genius and of the springs of invention within him, he failed to win the recognition that alone assured him even the barest means of existence. As a composer he earned virtually nothing. The general view of his music was that it was eccentric and ‘incorrect’. His admirers were passionate but few, and no worthy official post, such as a teaching appointment at the Conservatoire, came his way; he became merely its assistant librarian. He secured two government commissions (for the Grande messe des morts in 1837 and the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale in 1840), but neither of these was particularly profitable or helpful to his artistic standing. He was compelled to earn a living in a profession at which he excelled but which he abhorred – as a critic. He wrote for L’Europe littéraire in 1833, Le rénovateur from 1833 to 1835, and principally from 1834 for the Gazette musicale (later to become the Revue et gazette musicale) and the Journal des débats, an influential newspaper whose proprietors, the Bertins, were his staunch supporters. He was soon to be better known to Parisians as a critic than as a composer. Journalism took him away from composing and from its essential adjunct, performance. Gladly would Berlioz have devoted more of his time to giving concerts, even though the financial burdens were always severe. The record of his concerts in Paris is as follows: in 1832 he gave two, in 1833 five, in 1834 four, in 1835 six, in 1836 two, in 1837 the official performance of the Grande messe des morts, in 1838 two, in 1839 three, in 1840 five (see Paris, fig.28), in 1841 one and in 1842 four. The programme was normally made up of his own music interspersed with vocal and instrumental solos and occasionally works by Beethoven, Weber, Spontini and others. Liszt, Chopin, Hallé and other members of the richly cosmopolitan circle of musicians who then inhabited Paris took part. After 1835, when Girard bungled a performance of Harold en Italie, Berlioz resolved to conduct his own works himself. This led in turn to an illustrious career as one of the first specialist orchestral conductors, in wide demand outside France for his skill and interpretative insight. Discouragement could not stem the flow of major compositions. Harold en Italie was composed in the summer of 1834 in response to a request from Paganini for a work in which he might display a fine Stradivari viola. Berlioz used the opportunity to devise an unusual symphony with concerto elements in which echoes of his Italian journey are presented in the cloak of Byron’s Childe Harold. As in the Symphonie fantastique, a recurrent theme again serves to unify the four movements, but the modest role of the viola solo deterred Paganini from ever playing it. If the image of Beethoven was still vivid in Berlioz’s mind at this time, his primary concern, for professional as well as artistic reasons, was to win success at the Opéra. Only thus was real recognition to be sought; only thus, too, could Berlioz prove himself in the noble line of Gluck and Spontini. Les francs-juges had already been revised once before he left for Italy. After his return he made a further attempt, with Thomas Gounet’s help, to refashion it into a single act, but it still aroused no interest. After abandoning it, he considered a comic opera on Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (this eventually materialized as Béatrice et Bénédictin 1862) and briefly contemplated Hamlet before persuading Léon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier, with Alfred de Vigny’s assistance, to make a libretto out of Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita (Memoirs), a book whose abundant incident appealed strongly to him. It provided, too, the irresistible local colour of Renaissance Italy. First written as an opéra comique with dialogue, the libretto was refused in 1834, but by elevating the tone and expanding the action Berlioz was able to offer it to the Opéra. It was accepted in 1836 and performed in September 1838. At that time the music of Meyerbeer and Halévy held such sway at the Opéra that few members of the company were able or prepared to consider Berlioz’s bewilderingly original and inventive music with real seriousness. At all events, the three performances of 1838 were a clear failure (fig.3), and the management had little interest in the few fragmentary revivals the following year. Berlioz described the experience with bitterness as being ‘stretched on the rack’, for it not only humiliated him as an artist, it also closed the door of the Opéra to him, except as the arranger of other men’s works, for the rest of his life. Berlioz was preoccupied at the same time with a half-Revolutionary, half-Napoleonic conception on the grandest scale, which took various forms. Remnants of the 1824 mass, a military symphony sketched out on the journey back from Italy, and a preoccupation with the Last Judgment all contributed to plans for a huge work in seven movements commemorating France’s national heroes, of which two movements were completed in 1835. These do not survive, although they were probably included in the Requiem commissioned by the minister of the interior and performed in the Invalides on 5 December 1837, and also perhaps in the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, another government commission, performed during the tenth anniversary of the 1830 Revolution on 28 July 1840. Both works exploit Berlioz’s interest in grandiose spatial effects and in the appropriate matching of instrumental forces to the occasion and the place for which a piece was intended. The Symphonie funèbrewas originally written for large military band and performed out of doors. Berlioz later added parts for strings and for chorus. Traces of his Napoleonic leanings may be seen in his setting for solo bass, chorus and orchestra of Béranger’s Le cinq mai, first performed in 1835. In contrast to these, many compositions of the 1830s were delicate and intimate. He continued to write songs, of which some were orchestrated, such as La captive and Le jeune pâtre breton. Sara la baigneuse, an exceptionally refined setting of a Hugo poem, was first heard in 1834. Les nuits d’été, six settings of Gautier poems with piano accompaniment, appeared in 1841: all six were later orchestrated. Paganini’s unexpected gift of 20,000 francs in December 1838,
a token of his admiration for Harold en Italie, made possible the
composition of Roméo et Juliette, and consoled Berlioz for
the failure of Benvenuto Cellini. ‘My one idea was to put it
to a musical purpose. I would give up everything else and write a
really important work, something splendid on a grand and original
plan, full of passion and imagination, worthy to be dedicated to the
glorious artist to whom I owed so much.’ Berlioz wrote movingly
of the ardent months of composition and he came to regard the ‘Scène
d’amour’ as one of his finest things. The critics accused
him of failing to understand Shakespeare, although for Wagner at least,
who was present at one of the first performances, it was a ‘revelation’. 4. 1842–1848. About 1841 Berlioz reached a turning-point in his career. In that year the only music of his publicly performed in Paris was the set of recitatives composed for Weber’s Der Freischütz in order to make it acceptable to the Opéra’s ban on spoken dialogue. At the same time reports of performances abroad were increasingly common. The Requiem, for example, was heard in St Petersburg, while smaller works, such as the overtures, especially Les francs-juges, were becoming more frequently heard in England and Germany. He still withheld publication of the symphonies to prevent performances outside his control, so that it was growing urgent to go abroad in person, and to reinforce a developing international reputation. At the same time the frustrations of Paris made themselves more keenly felt, with the brighter enthusiasms of 1830 already receding and bourgeois tastes daily more evident, especially in the theatre. His marriage was perhaps already strained. For the first time his musical creativity waned, with no major works appearing for five years. He worked intermittently and unenthusiastically on a Scribe libretto for the Opéra, La nonne sanglante, which was never completed. On the other hand his literary activity was extending beyond the regular demands of his newspaper criticisms to a comprehensive study of orchestration, which began to appear in 1841 in the Revue et gazette musicale and which was published as the Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes in 1843. For the next 20 years much of Berlioz’s time was spent on peregrinations of Germany, Austria, Russia and England. Curiosity about advanced music was more evident in such places than in Paris, and the administrative and financial problems of promoting concerts were fewer. The more he travelled the more bitter he became about conditions at home; yet though he contemplated settling abroad – in Dresden, for instance, and in London – he always went back to Paris. His first concert abroad was on 26 September 1842 in Brussels. His two concerts there were, in Berlioz’s words, ‘merely an experiment’, but sufficiently successful to justify the more ambitious tour that followed shortly afterwards. He was abroad from December 1842 to the end of May 1843, and his tour took in visits to Brussels, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hechingen, Mannheim, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden, back to Leipzig, Brunswick, Hamburg, Berlin, Hanover and Darmstadt. The tour was vividly recounted in open letters to his friends published initially in the Journal des débats, then collected in the Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie in 1844 and finally forming part of his Mémoires. He met new friends, including Schumann, revived his acquaintance with old ones – Mendelssohn and Wagner, for example – and made a study of orchestral playing in the different cities he visited. Generally his reception was wholeheartedly warm, a foretaste of many enthusiastic welcomes he was to receive in Germany. To his reputation as a new and original voice as composer was added that of being a leading modern conductor, even though he conducted few works by other composers on his first tour. His return prompted the following reflections: Paris is where music one moment lies moribund and the next moment seethes with life; where it is sublime and second-rate, lordly and cringing, beggar and king; where it is at once glorified and despised, worshipped and insulted. In Paris music too often speaks to morons, barbarians and the deaf. You see it walking freely and without restraint, or barely able to move for the clammy fetters with which Routine shackles its powerful limbs. In Paris music is a god – so long as only the skinniest sacrifices are required to feed its altars. Berlioz was accompanied on the German tour by a singer of mixed French and Spanish birth, Marie Recio, who sang in most of his concerts. For her he orchestrated the song Absence, from Les nuits d’été, which she sang in Leipzig for the first time. His feelings for her had none of the passionate élan he had felt towards Harriet Smithson, indeed he tried to escape her pursuit on a number of occasions. On this relationship his letters and writings are more or less silent, yet prosaic or not, it was to last 20 years, until her death. After his separation from Harriet in 1844, Berlioz was confronted with supporting two households and with the even more distressing spectacle of Harriet’s acute decline. Yet for his son, Louis, Berlioz felt an affection that was to grow stronger until it became the very focus of his emotional life. The two years that elapsed before undertaking another concert tour were unremarkable, especially since he was now 40 and nel mezzo del cammin of his life. They were not unproductive, but were devoted far more to journalism and publication of his music and of his two first literary works than to composition. The Mémoires dwell on his endless obligations as feuilletoniste and on his concerts, the largest of which was on 1 August 1844 as part of the Grand Festival de l’Industrie, with over 1000 performers (fig.5). Four concerts early in 1845 formed a festival promoted by the Théâtre Franconi and were also given with large orchestra and chorus. From this period originates Berlioz’s unfortunate reputation as a noisy composer, and the cartoonists were not slow to exploit the image (fig.6). The finest composition of this period is the Corsaire overture, sketched in Nice immediately after the exertions of the Grand Festival de l’Industrie in 1844 and given at first with the title La tour de Nice. The broad and majestic Hymne à la France also dates from this year. Earlier he had arranged parts of his opera Benvenuto Cellini into a brilliant overture, Le carnaval romain, played for the first time on 3 February 1844, and an arrangement of Leopold de Meyer’s Marche marocaine had a notable success a year later. He saw both the Symphonie fantastique and the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale through the press at this time. In 1845 began a more intensive and varied succession of concert tours. The first was to Marseilles and Lyons, followed by a visit to Bonn for the Beethoven festival organized by Liszt and attended by leading musicians from all over Europe and a number of crowned heads. There followed a lengthy tour of Austria, Bohemia and Hungary that brought his name and music even more decisively into the forefront of European attention. Once again he recounted the details of his travels in the Journal des débats two years later and subsequently in his Mémoires. His itinerary was as follows: by carriage to Linz and thence by steamer to Vienna, where he stayed over two months and gave five concerts. He added two new songs to his repertory, Zaïdefor soprano and Le chasseur danois for bass, and his concerts, which included at least parts of all his major works to date, were a ‘grandissime succès’. One concert was devoted to a complete performance of Roméo et Juliette, and he had no need to exaggerate his reports of applause and enthusiasm; it was a reception entirely different from anything he had ever experienced in Paris. He then gave three concerts in Prague in as many weeks and then another back in Vienna. In February 1846 he gave three concerts in Pest, including a new arrangement of the Rákóczy March, rapturously received by an audience conscious of its national aspirations. He gave a concert in Breslau, then three more in Prague, where he found the musicians ‘generally speaking the finest in Europe’ and where he enjoyed success and admiration greater even than in Vienna. On his way back to Paris he gave one concert in Brunswick, on 24 April 1846. Not only had Berlioz won unprecedented laurels and acclaim on this tour: he had also composed the bulk of a large new work, La damnation de Faust. For some years his mind had been turning back to Goethe’s Faust and the settings he had rejected in 1829. A librettist, Almire Gandonnière, supplied some material before his departure from Paris, and Berlioz wrote the rest himself: henceforth he would write all his own major texts. La damnation de Faust was put together in the various cities he stayed in, including Passau, Vienna, Pest, Breslau and Prague. It was completed and orchestrated on his return, although composition was briefly interrupted by the commission of Le chant des chemins de fer for the opening of the Chemin de Fer du Nord at Lille on 14 June 1846, an occasion wittily recounted in Les grotesques de la musique. The first performance of La damnation de Faust, given on 6 December 1846 at the Opéra-Comique, was a serious reverse, both artistically and financially. Faust was given twice before a half-empty house. The fashionable
Paris audience, the audience which goes to concerts and is supposed
to take an interest in music, stayed comfortably at home, as little
concerned with my new work as if I had been the obscurest Conservatoire
student …. Nothing in my career as an artist wounded me more
deeply than this unexpected indifference. great success, great profit, great performances, etc. etc. … France is becoming more and more philistine towards music, and the more I see of foreign lands the less I love my own. Art, in France, is dead; so I must go where it is still to be found. In England apparently there has been a real revolution in the musical consciousness of the nation in the last ten years. We shall see. So he left Paris once again, reaching London in early November 1847.
He had been engaged by Louis Jullien as conductor of the opening season
at Drury Lane, and the works in his charge were Donizetti’s Lucia
di Lammermoorand Linda di Chamounix, Balfe’s The Maid of Honour
and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. The season opened in December,
yet within a month Berlioz was sensing alarm at Jullien’s approaching
bankruptcy. Jullien had all the bravado and showmanship of the charlatan,
and though the opera season ran its full two months Berlioz was never
paid. He pinned his hopes, instead, on a concert of his own music,
which won many admirers. At the same juncture revolution broke out
in Paris, and Berlioz was perhaps thankful to be away from the barricades.
He began to piece together his Mémoires and added a preface
that despairs of artistic life in France. His one salaried post, as
librarian of the Conservatoire, was threatened, and many of his friends
were fleeing the Continent to settle in England, chief of them Charles
Hallé. Despite Jullien’s failure Berlioz found the English
friendly and hospitable and their appetite for music encouraging.
A second major concert on 29 June 1848 in Hanover Square Rooms established
his reputation, especially in the eyes of the London press, and he
contemplated staying if a suitable position were offered to him. Yet
he returned to Paris, perhaps because his feuilletons offered him
his sole regular income and because it was after all, as he himself
ironically noted, his home. 5. 1848–1863. Henceforth Berlioz’s tours to foreign cities were almost all to places he had visited before; his years of first conquest were over. In the space of six years his European fame had flowered and he had, too, published most of his major works (Benvenuto Cellini and Faust were exceptions), making possible the further dissemination of his music. Success abroad went a long way to compensating for failure at home, and he continued to make regular visits to England and Germany for 15 years. The new regime in France made the Romantic heyday seem even more remote, and soon Second Empire tastes were to infiltrate all walks of life. But Berlioz achieved a new lofty detachment based on his powerfully ironic sense of humour and on his deep-rooted faith in classical ideals. One may detect a new repose in his music after 1850, linking him with his adored Gluck and isolating him both from Parisian taste and from the new schools of Liszt and Wagner. It is not necessary to chronicle every foreign tour of this period. The majority gave him deep satisfaction and showed a genuine understanding in his audiences. The most notable events were in Weimar where Liszt’s position at the Duke of Saxe-Weimar’s court allowed him to promote certain works of Berlioz. In March 1852 Liszt revived Benvenuto Cellini, after which Berlioz, with Liszt’s aid, devised a new version, partly to improve the dramaturgy and partly to meet the demands of German taste. Its success in Weimar and other German cities was lasting. In November 1852 Liszt gave a Berlioz Week, with Benvenuto Cellini and Roméo et Juliette and two parts of La damnation de Faust, which was later dedicated to Liszt when published in 1854. In reply Liszt dedicated his own Faust Symphony to Berlioz. Further visits by Berlioz to Weimar in 1855 and 1856 were the occasion of discussions in which the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt’s mistress, urged Berlioz to pursue his dream of a large epic opera based on the Aeneid; it came to fruition in Les Troyens in 1858. But in London Benvenuto Cellini fared badly when it was performed there, at Covent Garden in June 1853, and was rapidly withdrawn, as it had been in Paris in 1838. This was a single blot on Berlioz’s otherwise happy reception in England in all his five visits. His stay in 1851, as a member of the international jury to examine musical instruments at the Great Exhibition, produced some remarkable impressions in his reports to the Paris press, above all the experience of hearing 6500 children intoning All people that on earth do dwell during the Charity Children’s annual service in St Paul’s Cathedral. Six concerts in Exeter Hall in 1852, in which his own music had relatively little prominence, were ‘an altogether extraordinary success exceeding anything I had had in Russia and Germany’. Two performances of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, in particular, set the seal on his celebrity as a conductor, and contributed to an invitation from the New Philharmonic Society to conduct their 1855 season. Since Wagner was then conducting the old Philharmonic Society it provided an occasion for the two men to meet and to exchange sympathy and encouragement in fuller measure than at any other time in their careers. Subsequently their radically divergent conceptions of music were to bring an estrangement between them. Other foreign visits that Berlioz recalled with satisfaction were to Hanover, Brunswick and Dresden in 1854, to Brussels in 1855, and his regular engagements for the summer season at Baden-Baden. He first conducted there in 1853 and was engaged every year from 1856 to 1863. Bénazet, manager of the casino, ‘let me have everything I could possibly want for the performance of my works. His munificence in this respect has far surpassed anything ever done for me even by those European sovereigns whom I have most reason to be grateful to’. It was Bénazet who commissioned for the Baden-Baden theatre Berlioz’s last work, Béatrice et Bénédict, first performed in 1862. At home in Paris Berlioz made another determined attempt to win an audience for his music by the formation of a Société Philharmonique, in clear rivalry to the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. This new body gave its first concert on 19 February 1850 with Berlioz as conductor. Despite initial success the society was troubled by internal dissent and by an early shortage of funds, and lasted only until May 1851. But in that period Berlioz had conducted a wide range of music and had introduced some of his own works, notably L’adieu des bergers, later to be the central part of L’enfance du Christ. At its first performance Berlioz attributed it to an imaginary 17th-century composer Pierre Ducré, allowing him to delight in the delusion of his audience. The Société Philharmonique also gave his Requiem in the church of St Eustache. The complete L’enfance du Christ was first heard in Paris on 10 December 1854 having grown from L’adieu des bergers and La fuite en Egypte. Many critics observed a more restrained style in the work, but Berlioz insisted that on the contrary only his subject matter had changed and that his primary stylistic aim, accuracy of expressive content, was still unchanged. Berlioz’s monumental manner was represented by the Te Deum, composed in 1849, although the conception probably goes back three or four years earlier. He found no opportunity to perform this work until April 1855, when it was included in the large-scale events promoted in connection with the Exposition Universelle. By that time he had added to its two choruses a part for large children’s choir, inspired by his experience in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1851. In November 1855 Berlioz conducted three big concerts in the Palais de l’Industrie for the closing events of the Exposition. Throughout the 1840s and most of the 1850s the Société des Concerts, Paris’s longest-established and most regular concert-giving body, continued to ignore Berlioz’s music completely. His father died in 1848. Berlioz had felt deeply attached to him, the more since the strain in their relationship during Berlioz’s first days in Paris had passed, and he felt the loss keenly. He remained close to both his surviving sisters, Nanci and Adèle, who died in 1850 and 1860 respectively – and their families. He inherited a modest income from his father’s estate, which relieved some of his financial burdens. Harriet Smithson died in 1854 after four years of severe paralysis. Berlioz wrote movingly of her and of the failure of their happiness in the Mémoires; he never forgot the impression she first made on him or the style of dramatic interpretation that coloured his own conception of Shakespeare. He married Marie Recio seven months later, a natural step after their 12-year association, and though she had not sung in public for some years he still had to suffer the damage done by her spiteful attitude to other musicians, Wagner especially. With her came her Spanish mother who outlived them both and cared generously for Berlioz in his last years. His son Louis, now in the French navy, caused Berlioz many an anxiety after a difficult adolescence, but gradually there developed a strong bond between them. In Louis’ words: ‘The thread of my life is but the extensions of my father’s. When it is cut, both lives will end’. Louis saw action in the Crimean War and in the Baltic. In 1867, when captain of a merchant ship plying between France and Mexico, he died of yellow fever in Havana, one of the severest blows Berlioz ever had to suffer and a direct contribution to his own final decline. In Louis’ love of travel and the sea Berlioz saw a reflection of his own lifelong, idealized passion for distant lands, inextricably interwoven with his dream of a land where art and music enjoyed unfettered cultivation, where the frustrations and miseries of Paris were not to be found. In 1862, in response, Louis came to love and admire his father’s music. Berlioz’s compositions in the 1840s were haphazard in origin and frequency, partly because of his diversion of energy to travel, conducting, proof correction and journalism. In the following decade these diversions were no less pressing but he now found the mental and spiritual calm to produce a series of masterpieces that shine nobly through the day-to-day battles he was obliged to fight. After the Te Deum of 1849, his main productions were L’enfance du Christ, composed to his own text mostly in 1854. Another work of 1854 is the cantata in honour of the Emperor L'impériale, played at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Early in 1856 he orchestrated most of Les nuits d’été (Absence had been orchestrated in 1843) for publication in Winterthur, though he never heard more than Absence and Le spectre de la rose in orchestral form. At that point (April 1856) he yielded to his desire to compose a vast epic opera based on the second and fourth books of Virgil’s Aeneid. The idea had been in his mind for five years or so, and had doubtless haunted him since childhood when he wept at his father’s readings of Virgil. His love of Virgil had stayed with him even through the blinding discoveries of Shakespeare and Goethe and came back to him with irresistible force in his maturity. His muse was now in full flight, for long disillusionment with the world seems to have fanned the creative flame even though he knew what difficulties he would face if it were ever written. By abandoning most of his concert tours and much of his journalism he did in fact complete Les Troyens, words and music, in less than two years, with small additions and revisions to be made at intervals over the next five. It is a five-act grand opera in the French classical tradition, on the same approximate scale as Meyerbeer’s operas and many others that enjoyed regular performance in Paris, and composed with the Opéra in mind. Yet Berlioz’s chances of securing a production in which his work would receive attention at all close to its merits were negligible from the first – a fact he was fully aware of. The following five years were devoted to a series of frustrating
attempts to see Les Troyens on the stage. Berlioz’s enemies in
the press were quick to exaggerate its length and its demands, and
the failure of Benvenuto Cellini was still remembered at the Opéra.
He gave numerous readings of the poem to carefully chosen audiences;
he vainly sought the patronage of Napoleon III and his ministers.
Eventually, in 1860, he accepted an offer to mount it at the Théâtre
Lyrique, an independent theatre run by the enterprising impresario
Carvalho, while Wagner’s Tannhäuserwas staged with unprecedented
extravagance at the Opéra. Its failure in March 1861 was bitterly
ironic for Berlioz, and it created an opportunity for Les Troyens
to be accepted at the Opéra. This agreement fell through early
in 1863 so turning Berlioz back to the Théâtre-Lyrique,
where, in order to see any production at all, he was forced to divide
his opera into two parts, Acts 1 and 2 becoming La prise de Troie
and Acts 3 to 5 Les Troyens à Carthage. The second part was
first performed on 4 November 1863, with Mme Charton-Demeur as Dido.
It was an unequivocal success, warmly admired by the majority of the
press and running to 21 performances. Berlioz was proud and touched,
but gradually embittered, then enraged, to see cuts made by Carvalho
at subsequent performances (the ‘Chasse royale et orage’,
for example, was played on the first night only) and to see the printed
vocal scores being mutilated to match the performances ‘like
the carcass of a calf on a butcher’s stall’. Of La prise
de Troie Berlioz only ever heard one extract sung at Baden-Baden in
1859. 6. 1863–1869. After 1863 Berlioz discouraged revivals of Les Troyens and none took place for nearly 30 years. The financial fruits were compensation for his artistic despair, for he was enabled at long last to resign his duties as critic of the Journal des débats. He retired from composition and criticism, and allowed his spirit to be overcome by a despair and disillusionment of appalling intensity. He became morbidly conscious of death, especially since the loss of two sisters and two wives, and as more and more of his contemporaries and friends disappeared he haunted the cemeteries. In 1864 he wrote: I am in my 61st year; past hopes, past illusions, past high thoughts and lofty conceptions. My son is almost always far away from me. I am alone. My contempt for the folly and baseness of mankind, my hatred of its atrocious cruelty, have never been so intense. And I say hourly to Death: ‘When you will’. Why does he delay? And yet he lived another five years, suffering acutely from a form of intestinal neuralgia that had first appeared some ten years before and had reached severe proportions by 1859. Physical pain was never far away in the last 15 years, accentuated by his spiritual isolation. He depended more and more on a diminishing circle of friends for comfort, especially Stephen Heller, the Damckes, the Massarts and Edouard Alexandre. From time to time he would give readings of Shakespeare; but music he usually avoided. He went to few public concerts or operas, making an exception for Don Giovanni, for Pasdeloup’s concerts where Les francs-juges overture and parts of Les Troyenswere played, and for the Opéra’s revival of Gluck’s Alcestein October 1866. He completed and revised his Mémoires. 1200 copies were printed in 1865 and stored in his office in the Conservatoire. A few close friends received copies; the rest were to be published after his death. The final pages of the Mémoires reveal the single ray of light that penetrated an otherwise all-pervading gloom. In 1864 he felt an overwhelming impulse to revisit the scenes of his childhood, especially Meylan, near Grenoble, where his adored Estelle had lived as a child. He had made an earlier pilgrimage and even written to her in 1848, but this time, having discovered that she was living in Lyons, he wrote again and paid her a visit. She was now a widow of 67, he 60, yet the memory of their childhood encounter was fully alive in his mind. ‘My soul leapt out towards its idol the moment I saw her, as if she had still been in the splendour of her beauty.’ Berlioz was enraptured to be in her presence, to kiss her hand, and, next day, to receive even a brief and formal letter from her. He sought permission to write to her, and for the rest of his life he did, nearly every month. He visited her the following three summers in Geneva, where she went to live with her son. She accepted his attentions with calmness and incomprehension turning gradually to understanding and sympathy. The full extent of his dependence on this glimpse of his own childhood cannot be measured: not for the first time he had fallen in love with an idealized vision, reality transfigured by imagination. Berlioz had not wholly given up conducting his own music abroad.
In December 1866 he accepted an invitation to conduct La damnation
de Faust in Vienna. Hanslick, who had admired Roméo et Juliette
in 1846, castigated the music but in general its success was immense.
Age, illness and his poor knowledge of German now impaired his conducting
skill, but he was lionized by Cornelius and Herbeck and fêted
as he had been in 1845. The following February he conducted Harold
en Italie and parts of Béatrice et Bénédict in
Cologne as the guest of his old friend from 1830, Ferdinand Hiller.
The final burst of energy was his acceptance of an invitation to St
Petersburg in November 1867, shortly after the death of Louis. Perhaps
he thought he would find renewal and escape. Instead the journey and
the concerts – six in St Petersburg and two in Moscow –
shattered his remaining strength. Not even the instinctively sympathetic
response from the emerging school of Russian composers or the overwhelming
public applause staved off a sense of impending collapse. He went
directly to Nice, scene of happy memories of 1831 and 1844, and Monte
Carlo. Twice, walking by the sea, he fell and was picked up dazed
and bleeding. He returned to Paris where he had 12 months to live,
now little more than a shadow, dragging out what had come to seem
a meaningless existence. He died on 8 March 1869, having been cared
for by his mother-in-law and visited by his remaining friends, the
Damckes, Saint-Saëns and Reyer. He was buried in the Cimetière
du Nord, Montmartre, on 11 March 1869.
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