Hector Berlioz

1803–1869, FRENCH

In many ways the archetypal Romantic composer, Berlioz took up music against his family’s wishes and was undervalued in his country. His most famous work, Symphonie fantastique, emerged out of an obsessive love.

HECTOR BERLIOZ
A portrait by Alexis-Marie Lahaye shows Berlioz dressed in black, the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor, awarded to him in 1839, prominent on his chest. But for most of his career, he was held in higher regard abroad than at home in France.

IN CONTEXT

The Romantic movement

Berlioz’s life coincided with the rise of the Romantic movement, which affected literature, painting, and music. Reacting to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, there arose a taste for conveying themes that were bizarre, exotic, violent, or macabre. Berlioz was drawn to such subjects. His winning entry for the Prix de Rome was a cantata, The Death of Sardanapalus—a scene of butchery made notorious in a painting by Eugène Delacroix. Similarly, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique climaxes in a witches’ sabbath, a favorite theme of Spanish painter Francisco Goya.

THE DEATH OF SARDANAPALUS, EUGENE DELACROIX, 1827

Born in a village near Grenoble, Hector Berlioz was the eldest of six children. His father, Louis, a highly respected country doctor, was one of the first Westerners to use acupuncture in his treatments. He took a keen interest in his son’s upbringing, educating him at home. Under his guidance, Hector developed an abiding love for classical literature and culture.

Conflicting paths

Hector’s education was wide-ranging, but it was geared to preparing him for the medical profession, so music had a minor role. The boy learned to play his father’s flageolet (a woodwind instrument) and was given some lessons on the flute and the guitar. Unusually for a composer, he had no formal training on the piano and was never particularly proficient on any instrument, although he did become a very fine conductor. With typical bullishness, Berlioz chose to put a positive spin on this. He believed that he had been “saved from the tyranny of keyboard habits, so dangerous to thought, and from the lure of conventional harmonies.” Instead, it would be the orchestra that formed the basis of his compositional outlook.

Hector worked hard, earning the grades he needed for admission to medical school. He managed this in spite of the distractions of falling in love. Throughout his teenage years, he was obsessed with a girl in the neighborhood, Estelle Duboeuf, who was seven years his senior. This could easily have been dismissed as an adolescent crush, but Hector never forgot her and renewed their friendship in the 1860s.

In 1821, Berlioz began his studies at the medical school in Paris. He did his best to follow his parents’ wishes, but a clash of wills became inevitable. For the most part, this was down to Hector’s genuine distaste for the horrors of the dissection room. At the same time, his commitment to music grew rapidly, as he enjoyed the cultural benefits of living in the capital. He visited the Opéra and the theater and, from 1822, he began to frequent the library of the Conservatoire.

BATON
This conductor’s baton belonged to Hector Berlioz. It is now on display at the museum dedicated to the composer in the house where he was born in La Côte-Saint-André, Isère, southeastern France.

Berlioz graduated from medical school in 1824, when he was finally compelled to inform his parents that he was going to make his career in music. They already suspected this, but were still horrified. His father cut his allowance, while his puritanical mother even laid a curse on him. By this stage, Berlioz had already started composing, supplementing his meager income with some music criticism. His first significant production was his Messe solennelle (Solemn Mass). Written in 1824, it was performed the following year. The score was subsequently lost and rediscovered only in 1991.

IN PROFILE

Harriet Smithson

Harriet Smithson (1800–1854) was an Irish actress noted for her beauty and her interpretation of Shakespearean roles. She began her career, aged just 14, at the Theatre Royal, Dublin. By 1818, she had moved to England, making her London debut at Drury Lane. She performed in comedies and tragedies, receiving good, though not outstanding, reviews. Smithson arrived in Paris in 1827. Once again, she acted in a variety of plays, but it was her performance as Ophelia in Hamlet that was really memorable. Berlioz saw the production and was spellbound, despite the fact that his English was limited.

PORTRAIT OF IRISH ACTRESS HARRIET SMITHSON, c. 1829

Obsessive love

In addition to opera, Berlioz also enjoyed drama, developing a great fondness for Shakespeare’s plays. In September 1827, he visited the Odéon, where he witnessed productions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet by an English theatrical company. Berlioz was transfixed, falling desperately in love with the leading lady, Harriet Smithson (see box). There was an obsessive quality about his passion for this beautiful stranger. Letters to her went unanswered and he moved into lodgings across the street from hers, only for her to promptly move out. Fortunately, Berlioz found a practical outlet for this fixation, using it as inspiration for his most famous creation, Symphonie fantastique.

Completed in 1830, this masterpiece is one of the most memorable landmarks of the Romantic movement. It has been hailed as a pioneering example of “program music”— a musical piece expressing themes and ideas that lie outside the scope of music itself and that are explained in program notes for the audience. Berlioz constructed his symphony in five movements, conveying the hopeless, unrequited love of a young musician. Plunged into despair, he takes opium, resulting in a series of outlandish visions, culminating in a march to the scaffold and an orgy at a witches’ sabbath. The object of the musician’s affections, his idée fixe, is represented by a melodic theme, which recurs in differing forms throughout the piece.

Harriet Smithson eventually heard a performance of the Symphonie in 1832 and, learning that it was about her, agreed to meet Berlioz. Romance blossomed and the couple were married in 1833. There was, however, no happy ending. Harriet gave birth to their son in 1834, but her own career was on the slide and the marriage soon turned sour. She became jealous and resentful of Hector’s growing success and turned increasingly to drink. They eventually parted and Berlioz took a new mistress, Marie Recio.

A BERLIOZ CONCERT
A caricature of Hector Berlioz published by Austrian journal Wiener Theaterzeitung in 1846 shows the composer conducting a deafening concert with an exploding cannon, and chaos and panic in the crowd; formally dressed concert-goers cover their ears against the terrible din.

During the course of the 1830s, Berlioz achieved professional recognition, although lack of money always remained a problem. In 1834, at the request of Niccolò Paganini, he composed Harold in Italy, a symphony with solo viola. Paganini never performed the work, but the composers remained on friendly terms and Paganini later gave Berlioz 20,000 francs to finance one of his other projects.

THE TROJANS
Artists from the Royal Opera, with Eva-Maria Westbroek as Dido (center), perform Berlioz’s five-act epic opera The Trojans, directed by David McVicar and conducted by Antonio Pappano at the Royal Opera House, London, in 2013.

Challenges and reputation

Berlioz also received a state commission for his Requiem (1837), which commemorates victims of the 1830 Revolution. This was a vast undertaking, involving more than 400 performers. A tremendous success, it was always cited by the composer as the achievement of which he was most proud.

The fate of Berlioz’s first opera, Benvenuto Cellini (1838), was rather less auspicious. The first night was a disaster and it closed after four performances. Critics have praised the verve and imagination of some sections, but the composer’s ambition undermined the overall effect. Berlioz was intent on cramming in so much variety, which was often delivered at a frenetic pace and demanded such virtuosity from his musicians, that the opera was not only technically difficult to perform but also challenging for an audience to process.

Similar problems were apparent in Berlioz’s most celebrated opera, Les Troyens (The Trojans, 1856–1858). Its original running time was well over five hours and the many, complex scene changes made it a nightmare to produce. As a result, he was obliged to divide it into two separate operas. The first full staging of the entire work did not take place until a production at Covent Garden in London in 1957.

Berlioz was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1839 and appointed curator of the Conservatoire library, but was passed over for many more important official posts. He was generally held in higher esteem outside France—his concert tours as conductor in England, Germany, and Russia, for example, were a triumph. Berlioz’s reputation in his home country grew after his death, aided greatly by the publication of his sparkling Memoirs (1865), and he is now revered as one of the nation’s greatest Romantic composers.

THE DAMNATION OF FAUST
This poster by Gustave Fraipont is for Berlioz’s epic work The Damnation of Faust, which was performed at the Monte Carlo theater, Paris, in 1893.