Hector Berlioz

French composer

• Born: December 11, 1803
• Birthplace: La Côte-André, France
• Died: March 8, 1869
• Place of death: Paris, France

One of the foremost exponents of Romanticism, Berlioz extended the art of orchestration in compositions of striking originality. His writings—which include a treatise on orchestration and a colorful memoir of his life—made contributions to both musical craft and cultural history. During his lifetime Berlioz’s music attained more popularity outside France than within it, where the eccentric notoriety of the man often overshadowed his genius.

Early Life

Louis-Hector Berlioz (behr-lee-ohs) was born on the morning of December 11, 1803, in the town of La Côte-Saint-André, about fifty-five kilometers northwest of Grenoble, France. Hector was the first of six children born to Louis-Joseph and Marie Antoinette Berlioz; his family, which had prospered over generations from tanning and other enterprises, could be traced on his father’s side to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Louis Berlioz was a kindly but serious man, who had received his medical degree in Paris only months after Hector’s birth; though culturally and intellectually refined far beyond the custom of his provincial locale, he came to be loved by the peasants he served. Hector’s mother figures in his life much less prominently than her husband. As a devout Roman Catholic, she provided him with a religious upbringing, but it seems not to have had a lasting impact.

After briefly attending school in La Côte, Berlioz’s education was directed with great success by his father at home. His studies included mathematics, history, and French literature, but geography became his favorite topic. At an early age, he also came to love Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.), learning to read the Roman author in the original Latin. At the age of twelve, on a family holiday in nearby Meylan, he experienced his first feelings of romantic love, a passion for a young woman of eighteen named Estelle Deboeuf. This brief, one-sided experience only slowly lost its hold upon his imagination.

Part of Berlioz’s education at home consisted of lessons in practical music making; Hector had learned to play the flageolet, a form of recorder, after finding one in a bureau drawer at home; in his teens, he was given a flute, which he soon learned to play capably. Later, he learned the guitar, but there was no piano in his home, and he never learned the instrument aside from picking out harmonies on its keys. Hector was not a child prodigy, but his natural musical gifts soon led him to compose short instrumental and vocal works, which he would play with family and friends. At the age of fifteen, he was naïvely offering his pieces to a well-known publisher.

Louis Berlioz had determined that his son should follow a medical career and set about preparing Hector and a young friend for medical studies, which commenced in Paris in 1821. Hector’s intellectual interest in his subjects was sincere, and he later praised some of the lecturers, but, when the course of study turned to the dissection of human cadavers, he recoiled violently from the work.

By 1824, Berlioz no longer pretended that he was studying medicine. Since the previous year, he had been a student in the classes of the composer Jean-François Le Sueur, who took a warm interest in him, and much of his time was devoted to attending opera performances, reading scores in the library of the music conservatory, and composing. This development was viewed with dismay by Berlioz’s parents, who had hoped that a few disappointments with music would persuade him to abandon his plans for a musical career. Despite occasional modest successes in the performance of his works, his failure to pass a music examination in 1826 caused his father to demand his return to La Côte. Louis persuaded his son to attempt once more to pass the examination; if he failed, he would choose a different profession.

By living extremely frugally and giving lessons in singing, flute, and guitar, Belioz was repaying a loan given by an acquaintance to finance a concert, when the thoughtless creditor requested the balance owing from Berlioz’s father. Enraged by Hector’s improvidence, Louis paid the debt but terminated Hector’s allowance, and the twenty-three-year-old composer was thrown into virtual poverty, surviving only by taking a job in a theater chorus. Disciplining mind and body, however, he continued his studies. After a period of months, he passed the examination qualifying him to compete for the Prix de Rome, a lucrative award of the Academy of Fine Arts of the Institute of France. Soon after, his father restored his allowance, and Berlioz was able to continue his operagoing on a grand scale. His favorite composers at the time were Christoph Gluck and Gaspare Spontini, but he despised the popular Gioacchino Rossini.

Like many of his contemporaries who regarded themselves as Romantic artists, Berlioz embraced the experience and display of emotion. In 1827, a company of actors arrived from England to present a season of performances of plays by William Shakespeare. This was Berlioz’s overwhelming introduction to Shakespeare on the stage, and it was also the beginning of his love for the actress Harriet Smithson, who played Ophelia on opening night. Berlioz’s involved and somewhat ostentatious passion for Henriette (as she is called in his memoirs) was to play a large part in the inspiration for his Symphonie fantastique (1830) and its sequel, Le Retour à la vie (1831), or Lélio , as it was later known. Unsuccessful attempts to get Henriette’s attention, including public concerts of his own work, were finally abandoned, but the beautiful and talented Henriette had already left her mark on Hector’s imagination.

Berlioz continued his musical studies at the conservatoire and began, around 1829, to write articles on music for the Paris press. Literary work, which he generally undertook to relieve his strained finances, often seemed to Berlioz to be a curse, but he had a natural capacity for writing and his contributions to music criticism are substantial. His literary experience also led him to compose music to poems by Victor Hugo and others, and the first composition to which Berlioz gave an opus number, Huit Scènes de Faust (1828), was based upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (1808). In 1830, The Death of Sardanapalus was the subject of a composition that won for him the Prix de Rome on his fourth attempt. The fictional but grotesque story of Sardanapalus had been broached only three years before by the painter Eugène Delacroix, partly relieving Berlioz of the reputation for excess that had dogged his previous competition efforts.

In the spring of 1830, Berlioz again fell in love, this time with a nineteen-year-old pianist, Marie Moke. They were soon engaged, despite the prospect of being separated by Berlioz’s impending year-long stay in Rome, a condition of the Prix de Rome stipend. Sensing that his absence would be a kind of spiritual imprisonment, he tried to gain an exemption from the requirement, but the authorities would not agree to it. His fiancé’s family was similarly unyielding, making the engagement conditional both upon his absence and upon the success of a pending performance of his Symphonie fantastique. After the work was successfully presented in December, Berlioz left for Rome, stopping to visit his family at La Côte early in the new year.

In residence at the French Academy in Rome for only a few weeks, growing fears about his engagement drove him to abandon the academy. Soon he learned in a letter from Marie’s mother that his fiancé was to marry a prosperous man of fifty-eight. Berlioz, enraged, became intent upon murder and suicide, and got as far as Nice before thinking better of his plan. Berlioz was allowed to return to the academy, but he was often moody, bored, and distracted in Rome, which was to him little more than a museum. Preferring nature to city life, he toured the surrounding countryside on foot, gathering impressions of its landscape and inhabitants that later inspired the symphonic work Harold in Italy (1834), a musical essay evoking the atmosphere of Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818, 1819). After more than a year in Italy, Berlioz returned to Paris, arriving in the capital on November 6, 1832. On the eve of his thirtieth year, he had been well seasoned by artistic struggles and by painful episodes in his personal life.

Life’s Work

The professional difficulties of Berlioz’s career were often concerned with finances or with the quality of performances that could be extracted from the French orchestras of the day. Sometimes these circumstances met to produce concerts that were financial as well as artistic failures, but more often Berlioz, an excellent conductor, fared well with Parisian audiences. A concert of December 9, 1832, designed to reintroduce himself to the public, featured the Symphonie fantastique and Lélio. Harriet Smithson, his unrequited love of four years past, was in the audience, doubtless uneasily aware that the two works had grown out of Berlioz’s passion for her in 1827-1828. The following day they met for the first time, and after months of fervent but strained courtship they were married. In August, 1834, their only child, Louis, was born.

The two works of that fateful December concert were conceived as a spiritual autobiography in music. From the moment Berlioz discovered his tragic muse in Henriette’s portrayals of Ophelia and Juliet, he had been immersed in a painful rapture that for a time had made creative activity almost impossible, and Symphonie fantastique was both a fulfillment and an exorcism of Berlioz’s torment. It is a “program symphony,” evoking “an episode in the life of an artist,” and follows a novelistic scenario including a ball, a march to execution, and a witches’ Sabbath. For all of its eccentricities and weaknesses, it is an influential landmark in music. Lélio, however, is generally regarded as a gratuitous, provocatively egotistic, and somewhat incoherent sequel. The true artistic sequel to the Symphonie fantastique is Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, featuring a solo viola part that gives the symphony something of the nature of a concerto.

The German poet Heinrich Heine, who was a friend of Berlioz, described the latter as “an immense nightingale, or a lark the size of an eagle,” whose music “causes me to dream of fabulous empires with fabulous sins.” This characterization encompasses something of the spirit of the man as well as his appearance: Berlioz’s artistic soul was both lyric and violent, as his appearance could seem either wistful or dramatic in turn. He was of medium height and angular, with a pronounced beaklike nose framed by intense, deep-set eyes and a great mass of hair.

The decade of 1835 through 1845 brought Berlioz fame both as composer and as conductor, but his successes were punctuated by the same kind of difficulties he had faced in previous years. He seems to have been a difficult man and was rarely at peace with the official cultural apparatus or with his colleagues. Financial problems continued and were intensified by the failure of Henriette’s career following a leg injury (by 1842, Berlioz had separated from her, though his affection survived to her death in 1854). His journalistic work and his need continually to promote his own compositions strained his health, which was not robust. Nevertheless, these were the years in which he composed some of his greatest works, including the Messe de morts, or Requiem (1837), the opera Benvenuto Cellini (1834-1838), the symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839), and the dramatic cantata La Damnation de Faust (1846), derived in part from his early Huit Scènes de Faust.

The Requiem, commissioned by the government for a civic funeral, shows Berlioz in full command both of his musical materials and of his sense of public occasion. Berlioz specified for the work 190 instruments and 210 voices, not including timpani and brass choirs to be heard at a distance. Certain passages achieve a great acoustical and emotional effect, but other parts of the mass are models of delicacy. Berlioz’s reputation for colossal effect is only partly justified, for he knew how to use large musical forces with restraint.

In 1842, Berlioz began a series of trips abroad that were to bring him many artistic triumphs and, not incidentally, a further source of income. He was in demand both as composer and conductor, and the accounts he gives in his memoirs of his travels in England, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Russia show him directing his own works as well as those of Gluck, Ludwig van Beethoven, and others. His journeys also gave him an opportunity to meet many of the leading performers and composers of Europe, including Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, and Richard Wagner, with whom he had a long-standing but ambivalent relationship.

When Berlioz was in his forties, his musical style began to show signs of retreat from the adventurous Romanticism of his youth. Official honors had already come his way: In 1839, he was made a member of the Legion of Honor and was given a modest salary as an official of the conservatory library. His treatise on orchestration and his Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie (a musical voyage in Germany and Italy) were published in 1844. Beyond these signs of increasing acceptance, however, the subtle moderation of his artistic outlook can be traced to other circumstances.

Berlioz was drained by work undertaken for the sake of paying for two households—Henriette’s and his own; his son, Louis, who had become a sailor, was often troublesome. More important, though, the melancholy streak in his character came to overrule his penchant for ostentation and experimentation. Berlioz turned more and more to the poetry of Vergil, which had stirred him as a child; a current of classicism emerged in his musical thought, expressing a conception of beauty that had perhaps lain dormant in him since youth. From this sensibility emerged much of Berlioz’s late work: L’Enfance du Christ , first performed in December, 1854, belongs to this late phase of his career; Les Troyens (1856-1858), with a libretto by Berlioz, is its culmination.

Berlioz’s musical work might well have ended with the staging of Les Troyens—he was suffering increasingly from an ill-defined internal malady—but a final commission, the two-act opera Béatrice et Bénédict , occupied him during 1860-1862. Based upon Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1598-1599), it is a gracious comedy that Berlioz found to be a relaxation after the immense labors of Les Troyens.

Berlioz’s last years brought him personal loss; in 1862, his second wife, Marie Recio, died suddenly. Her mother selflessly continued to look after Berlioz. In 1867, he was shattered by the news of his son’s death in Havana from a fever. Their relationship had been a close one, marked on the father’s side by patience and on the son’s by intense devotion. In his grief and physical suffering, Berlioz told a close friend that he hardly knew how he managed to continue living. However, in the winter of 1867-1868, he made a successful last tour to Russia on the invitation of the Grand Duchess Helena. To this evidence of his undiminished artistic renown, he is said to have exclaimed “Why am I so old and feeble?” In fact, he was to survive only one more year. In March, 1868, he suffered a serious fall while visiting the rocky coast near Nice; although by August he had recovered enough to attend a musical festival in Grenoble, he was unwell and began to experience loss of memory. After returning to Paris, he died on March 8, 1869.

Significance

Hector Berlioz was an artist whose career was formed to a great extent by the era into which he was born, the extraordinary period of upheaval when Napoleon I sought to subjugate Europe. The military conflicts of the period from 1805 to 1815 were followed in France by a reactionary politics that robbed the nation of economic and cultural vitality. Although Berlioz was, by most standards, not a political person, he was obliged to struggle against the cultural environment produced by politics. The soil on which his artistic genius had to take root was shallow and impoverished, and throughout his life—even discounting his contrary personality and his own exaggerations of his trials—he had to struggle against many odds, though they were perhaps more persistent than they were overwhelming.

The factor of temperament in Berlioz was undoubtedly strong. His precocious affinity for Vergil’s poetry is shown in an anecdote from his memoirs, where he recalls bursting into tears while reciting to his father the episode of the death of Dido in the Aeneid. Sensitivity to landscape—a legacy both of his formative environment and early literary experiences—become bonded, in the encounter with Estelle, to an enduring conception of ideal love. Around all of these circumstances lingers an echo of classical myth with a primitive accent, which the young provincial carried with him to Paris. Berlioz’s innate depth of sensibility was to be both a strength and a burden: It was a source of creative vitality that made him steadfast in the face of mediocre convention, but it also caused conflict in his professional relationships and probably narrowed his musical sympathies beyond necessity.

In his early years in Paris, Berlioz became a leading figure of the Romantic movement, acquiring a reputation as a somewhat rebellious genius. His unquestioned originality in certain spheres of musical composition was countered by a frequent lack of judgment in others. As an orchestrator he charted new territory, but his harmony and rhythm have often been criticized. Berlioz’s sense of melody has also had many detractors, but in fact he was a fine and original melodist at times and was capable of great delicacy of feeling. His reputation as a seeker after effects is not unjustified, but many of the effects are astonishingly impressive—as in the offstage brass choirs of the Requiem, for example.

Berlioz’s defiance of authority, his artistic daring, and the vigor of his journalistic rhetoric closely harmonize with the modern image of the Romantic artist, but the view of life he evoked in many of his major works exceeds the usual bounds of Romantic darkness. His capacity for despair, as man and artist, contrasts with more resilient figures such as Victor Hugo and Eugène Delacroix, who were his contemporaries. Though he gravitated toward classical ideals in his later music, clarity and harmony were never his secure possessions, either in art or in life.

Bibliography

Barzun, Jacques. Berlioz and the Romantic Century. 3d ed. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. First published in 1950, Barzun’s massive study was conceived in the spirit of the poet W. H. Auden’s remark that “whoever wants to know about the nineteenth century must know about Berlioz.” The author succeeds in being charming as well as thorough, and he provides an unmatched bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Berlioz and His Century: An Introduction to the Age of Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. This condensation of Barzun’s two-volume work on Berlioz concentrates on the composer’s life rather than his music. It has no sense of being a mere editing of the earlier books, but it is an introduction to Romanticism only in the most oblique way; as such, it cannot be substituted for a true survey of the period of Berlioz’s life.

Berlioz, Hector. The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz: Member of the French Institute, Including His Travels in Italy, Germany, Russia, and England, 1803-1865. Edited and translated by David Cairns. London: Gollancz, 1969. One of the great documents of nineteenth century European culture, but one that has to be read skeptically. Apart from some portions of the book that provide details of Berlioz’s concerts abroad, it is highly entertaining. Berlioz declined to write an autobiography in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but there is a quantity of intense self-revelation nevertheless.

Bloom, Peter. The Life of Berlioz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Biography, placing Berlioz’s life within the context of nineteenth century French history. Does not provide musical examples or analysis.

Cairns, David. Berlioz. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Detailed narrative of Berlioz’s life, based in part on previously unused material. Does not provide an analysis of Berlioz’s music or musical examples.

Elliot, J. H. Berlioz. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1938. A volume in the Master Musicians series, it efficiently fulfills all the standard requirements of biography, description, and analysis. Its perspective, though intelligently critical, appears inordinately fastidious. Excellent appendixes—a calendar, list of works, and the like—redeem the author’s somewhat limited enthusiasm for his subject.

Macdonald, Hugh. Berlioz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A comprehensive work that offers a biography, analysis of Berlioz’s character, and an examination of his compositions, tracing his musical influences and describing his compositions.

Rose, Michael. Berlioz Remembered. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. Rose seeks to supplement Berlioz’s memoirs by focusing on the effect the producer had on other people, including his friends, enemies, supporters, and critics.

Rushton, Julian. The Musical Language of Berlioz. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983. A work of critical scholarship rather than biography, this book may be consulted by the general reader for its introductory and concluding chapters and for its more recent bibliography.

Wotton, Tom S. Berlioz. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969. Barzun honored Wotton as the foremost Berlioz scholar of his time, but the style and diction of the book are rather antiquated.