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Hector Berlioz

Louis-Hector Berlioz[n 1] (11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869)

was a French Romantic composer and conductor. His output
includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and
Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem and
L'Enfance du Christ, his three operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les
Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of hybrid genres
such as the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette and the
"dramatic legend" La Damnation de Faust.

The elder son of a provincial physician, Berlioz was expected to

follow his father into medicine, and he attended a Parisian
medical college before defying his family by taking up music as a
profession. His independence of mind and refusal to follow
traditional rules and formulas put him at odds with the
conservative musical establishment of Paris. He briefly moderated
his style sufficiently to win France's premier music prize – the Prix
de Rome – in 1830, but he learned little from the academics of the Berlioz by August Prinzhofer, 1845
Paris Conservatoire. Opinion was divided for many years between
those who thought him an original genius and those who viewed
his music as lacking in form and coherence.

At the age of twenty-four Berlioz fell in love with the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson,
and he pursued her obsessively until she finally accepted him seven years later. Their marriage was
happy at first but eventually foundered. Harriet inspired his first major success, the Symphonie
fantastique, in which an idealised depiction of her occurs throughout.

Berlioz completed three operas, the first of which, Benvenuto Cellini, was an outright failure. The
second, the huge epic Les Troyens (The Trojans), was so large in scale that it was never staged in its
entirety during his lifetime. His last opera, Béatrice et Bénédict – based on Shakespeare's comedy
Much Ado About Nothing – was a success at its premiere but did not enter the regular operatic
repertoire. Meeting only occasional success in France as a composer, Berlioz increasingly turned to
conducting, in which he gained an international reputation. He was highly regarded in Germany,
Britain and Russia both as a composer and as a conductor. To supplement his earnings he wrote
musical journalism throughout much of his career; some of it has been preserved in book form,
including his Treatise on Instrumentation (1844), which was influential in the 19th and 20th
centuries. Berlioz died in Paris at the age of 65.

Life and career

1803–1821: early years

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Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803,[n 2]

the eldest child of Louis Berlioz (1776–1848), a physician,
and his wife, Marie-Antoinette Joséphine, née Marmion (1784–1838).[n 3] His birthplace was the
family home in the commune of La Côte-Saint-André in the département of Isère, in south-eastern
France. His parents had five more children, three of whom died in infancy;[7] their surviving
daughters, Nanci and Adèle, remained close to Berlioz throughout their lives.[6][8]

Berlioz's father, a respected local figure, was a progressively minded

doctor credited as the first European to practise and write about
acupuncture.[9] He was an agnostic with a liberal outlook; his wife was a
strict Roman Catholic of less flexible views.[10] After briefly attending a
local school when he was about ten, Berlioz was educated at home by his
father.[11] He recalled in his Mémoires that he enjoyed geography,
especially books about travel, to which his mind would sometimes
wander when he was supposed to be studying Latin; the classics
nonetheless made an impression on him, and he was moved to tears by
Virgil's account of the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas.[12] Later he studied
philosophy, rhetoric, and – because his father planned a medical career
for him – anatomy.[13]

Music did not feature prominently in the young Berlioz's education. His Louis Berlioz, the
father gave him basic instruction on the flageolet, and he later took flute composer's father c. 1840
and guitar lessons with local teachers. He never studied the piano, and
throughout his life played haltingly at best.[6] He later contended that this
was an advantage because it "saved me from the tyranny of keyboard habits, so dangerous to thought,
and from the lure of conventional harmonies".[14]

At the age of twelve Berlioz fell in love for the first time. The object of his affections was an eighteen-
year-old neighbour, Estelle Dubœuf. He was teased for what was seen as a boyish infatuation, but
something of his early passion for Estelle endured all his life.[15] He poured some of his unrequited
feelings into his early attempts at composition. Trying to master harmony, he read Rameau's Traité de
l'harmonie, which proved incomprehensible to a novice, but Charles-Simon Catel's simpler treatise on
the subject made it clearer to him.[16] He wrote several chamber works as a youth,[17] subsequently
destroying the manuscripts, but one theme that remained in his mind reappeared later as the A-flat
second subject of the overture to Les Francs-juges.[14]

1821–1824: Medical student

In March 1821 Berlioz passed the baccalauréat examination at the University of Grenoble – it is not
certain whether at the first or second attempt[18] – and in late September, aged seventeen, he moved
to Paris. At his father's insistence he enrolled at the School of Medicine of the University of Paris.[19]
He had to fight hard to overcome his revulsion at dissecting bodies, but in deference to his father's
wishes, he forced himself to continue his medical studies.[20]

The horrors of the medical college were mitigated thanks to an ample allowance from his father,
which enabled him to take full advantage of the cultural, and particularly musical, life of Paris. Music
did not at that time enjoy the prestige of literature in French culture,[6] but Paris nonetheless
possessed two major opera houses and the country's most important music library.[21] Berlioz took
advantage of them all. Within days of arriving in Paris he went to the Opéra, and although the piece
on offer was by a minor composer, the staging and the magnificent orchestral playing enchanted

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him.[n 4] He went to other works at the Opéra and the

Opéra-Comique; at the former, three weeks after his
arrival, he saw Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, which
thrilled him. He was particularly inspired by Gluck's use
of the orchestra to carry the drama along. A later
performance of the same work at the Opéra convinced
him that his vocation was to be a composer.[23]

The dominance of Italian opera in Paris, against which

Berlioz later campaigned, was still in the future,[24] and at
The Opéra, in the Rue le Peletier, Paris, the opera houses he heard and absorbed the works of
c. 1821 Étienne Méhul and François-Adrien Boieldieu, other
operas written in the French style by foreign composers,
particularly Gaspare Spontini, and above all five operas by
Gluck. [24][n 5] He began to visit the Paris Conservatoire library in between his medical studies, seeking
out scores of Gluck's operas and making copies of parts of them.[25] By the end of 1822 he felt that his
attempts to learn composition needed to be augmented with formal tuition, and he approached Jean-
François Le Sueur, director of the Royal Chapel and professor at the Conservatoire, who accepted him
as a private pupil.[26]

In August 1823 Berlioz made the first of many contributions to the musical press: a letter to the
journal Le Corsaire defending French opera against the incursions of its Italian rival.[27] He
contended that all Rossini's operas put together could not stand comparison with even a few bars of
those of Gluck, Spontini or Le Sueur.[28] By now he had composed several works including Estelle et
Némorin and Le Passage de la mer Rouge (The Crossing of the Red Sea) – both since lost.[29]

In 1824 Berlioz graduated from medical school,[29] after which he abandoned medicine, to the strong
disapproval of his parents. His father suggested law as an alternative profession and refused to
countenance music as a career.[30][n 6] He reduced and sometimes withheld his son's allowance, and
Berlioz went through some years of financial hardship.[6]

1824–1830: Conservatoire student

In 1824 Berlioz composed a Messe solennelle. It was performed twice, after which he suppressed the
score, which was thought lost until a copy was discovered in 1991. During 1825 and 1826 he wrote his
first opera, Les Francs-juges, which was not performed and survives only in fragments, the best
known of which is the overture.[32] In later works he reused parts of the score, such as the "March of
the Guards", which he incorporated four years later in the Symphonie fantastique as the "March to
the Scaffold".[6]

In August 1826 Berlioz was admitted as a student to the Conservatoire, studying composition under
Le Sueur and counterpoint and fugue with Anton Reicha. In the same year he made the first of four
attempts to win France's premier music prize, the Prix de Rome, and was eliminated in the first
round. The following year, to earn some money, he joined the chorus at the Théâtre des
Nouveautés.[29] He competed again for the Prix de Rome, submitting the first of his Prix cantatas, La
Mort d'Orphée, in July. Later that year he attended productions of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo
and Juliet at the Théâtre de l'Odéon given by Charles Kemble's touring company. Although at the time
Berlioz spoke hardly any English, he was overwhelmed by the plays – the start of a lifelong passion for

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Shakespeare. He also conceived a passion for Kemble's leading lady,

Harriet Smithson – his biographer Hugh Macdonald calls it "emotional
derangement" – and obsessively pursued her, without success, for several
years. She refused even to meet him.[4][6]

The first concert of Berlioz's music took place in May 1828, when his
friend Nathan Bloc conducted the premieres of the overtures Les Francs-
juges and Waverley and other works. The hall was far from full, and
Berlioz lost money.[n 7] Nevertheless, he was greatly encouraged by the
vociferous approval of his performers, and the applause from musicians
in the audience, including his Conservatoire professors, the directors of
the Opéra and Opéra-Comique, and the composers Auber and Hérold.[34]

Berlioz's fascination with Shakespeare's plays prompted him to start

Harriet Smithson as
learning English during 1828, so that he could read them in the original.
Ophelia
At around the same time he encountered two further creative
inspirations: Beethoven and Goethe. He heard Beethoven's third, fifth
and seventh symphonies performed at the Conservatoire,[n 8] and read
Goethe's Faust in Gérard de Nerval's translation.[29] Beethoven became both an ideal and an obstacle
for Berlioz – an inspiring predecessor but a daunting one.[36] Goethe's work was the basis of Huit
scènes de Faust (Berlioz's Opus 1), which premiered the following year and was reworked and
expanded much later as La Damnation de Faust.[37]

1830–1832: Prix de Rome

Berlioz was largely apolitical, and neither supported nor opposed the July Revolution of 1830, but
when it broke out he found himself in the middle of it. He recorded events in his Mémoires:

I was finishing my cantata when the revolution broke out ... I dashed off the final pages of my
orchestral score to the sound of stray bullets coming over the roofs and pattering on the wall
outside my window. On the 29th I had finished, and was free to go out and roam about Paris
till morning, pistol in hand.[38]

The cantata was La Mort de Sardanapale, with which he won the Prix de Rome. His entry the
previous year, Cléopâtre, had attracted disapproval from the judges because to highly conservative
musicians it "betrayed dangerous tendencies", and for his 1830 offering he carefully modified his
natural style to meet official approval.[6] During the same year he wrote the Symphonie fantastique
and became engaged to be married.[39]

By now recoiling from his obsession with Smithson, Berlioz fell in love with a nineteen-year-old
pianist, Marie ("Camille") Moke. His feelings were reciprocated, and the couple planned to be
married.[40] In December Berlioz organised a concert at which the Symphonie fantastique was
premiered. Protracted applause followed the performance, and the press reviews expressed both the
shock and the pleasure the work had given.[41] Berlioz's biographer David Cairns calls the concert a
landmark not only in the composer's career but in the evolution of the modern orchestra.[42] Franz
Liszt was among those attending the concert; this was the beginning of a long friendship. Liszt later
transcribed the entire Symphonie fantastique for piano to enable more people to hear it.[43]

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Shortly after the concert Berlioz set off for Italy: under the terms of the Prix
de Rome, winners studied for two years at the Villa Medici, the French
Academy in Rome. Within three weeks of his arrival he went absent without
leave: he had learnt that Marie had broken off their engagement and was to
marry an older and richer suitor, Camille Pleyel, the heir to the Pleyel piano
manufacturing company.[44] Berlioz made an elaborate plan to kill them
both (and her mother, known to him as "l'hippopotame"),[45] and acquired
poisons, pistols and a disguise for the purpose.[46] By the time he reached
Nice on his journey to Paris he thought better of the scheme, abandoned the
idea of revenge, and successfully sought permission to return to the Villa
Marie ("Camille") Moke,
Medici.[47][n 9] He stayed for a few weeks in Nice and wrote his King Lear later Pleyel
overture. On the way back to Rome he began work on a piece for narrator,
solo voices, chorus and orchestra, Le Retour à la vie (The Return to Life,
later renamed Lélio), a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique.[47]

Berlioz took little pleasure in his time in Rome. His colleagues at the Villa
Medici, under their benevolent principal Horace Vernet, made him
welcome,[49] and he enjoyed his meetings with Felix Mendelssohn, who was
visiting the city,[n 10] but he found Rome distasteful: "the most stupid and
prosaic city I know; it is no place for anyone with head or heart."[6]
Nonetheless, Italy had an important influence on his development. He
visited many parts of it during his residency in Rome. Macdonald comments
that after his time there, Berlioz had "a new colour and glow in his music ...
sensuous and vivacious" – derived not from Italian painting, in which he
was uninterested, or Italian music, which he despised, but from "the scenery
Berlioz when a student
and the sun, and from his acute sense of locale".[6] Macdonald identifies
at the Villa Medici, 1832,
Harold in Italy, Benvenuto Cellini and Roméo et Juliette as the most
by Émile Signol
obvious expressions of his response to Italy, and adds that Les Troyens and
Béatrice et Bénédict "reflect the warmth and stillness of the Mediterranean,
as well as its vivacity and force".[6] Berlioz himself wrote that Harold in
Italy drew on "the poetic memories formed from my wanderings in Abruzzi".[51]

Vernet agreed to Berlioz's request to be allowed to leave the Villa Medici before the end of his two-
year term. Heeding Vernet's advice that it would be prudent to delay his return to Paris, where the
Conservatoire authorities might be less indulgent about his premature ending of his studies, he made
a leisurely journey back, detouring via La Côte-Saint-André to see his family. He left Rome in May
1832 and arrived in Paris in November.[52]

1832–1840: Paris

On 9 December 1832 Berlioz presented a concert of his works at the Conservatoire. The programme
included the overture of Les Francs-juges, the Symphonie fantastique – extensively revised since its
premiere – and Le Retour à la vie, in which Bocage, a popular actor, declaimed the monologues.[47]
Through a third party, Berlioz had sent an invitation to Harriet Smithson, who accepted, and was
dazzled by the celebrities in the audience.[53] Among the musicians present were Liszt, Frédéric
Chopin and Niccolò Paganini; writers included Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Heinrich Heine,
Victor Hugo and George Sand.[53] The concert was such a success that the programme was repeated
within the month, but the more immediate consequence was that Berlioz and Smithson finally
met.[47]
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By 1832 Smithson's career was in decline. She presented a ruinously unsuccessful season, first at the
Théâtre-Italien and then at lesser venues, and by March 1833 she was deep in debt. Biographers differ
about whether and to what extent Smithson's receptiveness to Berlioz's wooing was motivated by
financial considerations;[n 11] but she accepted him, and in the face of strong opposition from both
their families they were married at the British Embassy in Paris on 3 October 1833.[55] The couple
lived first in Paris, and later in Montmartre (then still a village). On 14 August 1834 their only child,
Louis-Clément-Thomas, was born.[39] The first few years of the marriage were happy, although it
eventually foundered. Harriet continued to yearn for a career but, as her biographer Peter Raby
comments, she never learned to speak French fluently, which seriously limited both her professional
and her social life.[55]

Paganini, known chiefly as a violinist, had acquired a Stradivarius viola,

which he wanted to play in public if he could find the right music. Greatly
impressed by the Symphonie fantastique, he asked Berlioz to write him a
suitable piece.[56] Berlioz told him that he could not write a brilliantly
virtuoso work, and began composing what he called a symphony with
viola obbligato, Harold in Italy. As he foresaw, Paganini found the solo
part too reticent – "There's not enough for me to do here; I should be
playing all the time"[51] – and the violist at the premiere in November
1834 was Chrétien Urhan.[57]

Until the end of 1835 Berlioz had a modest stipend as a laureate of the
Prix de Rome.[39] His earnings from composing were neither substantial
nor regular, and he supplemented them by writing music criticism for the Paganini, by Ingres
Parisian press. Macdonald comments that this was activity "at which he
excelled but which he abhorred".[6] He wrote for L'Europe littéraire
(1833), Le Rénovateur (1833–1835), and from 1834 for the Gazette musicale and the Journal des
débats.[6] He was the first, but not the last, prominent French composer to double as a reviewer:
among his successors were Fauré, Messager, Dukas and Debussy.[58] Although he complained – both
privately and sometimes in his articles – that his time would be better spent writing music than in
writing music criticism, he was able to indulge himself in attacking his bêtes noires and extolling his
enthusiasms. The former included musical pedants, coloratura writing and singing, viola players who
were merely incompetent violinists, inane libretti, and baroque counterpoint.[59] He extravagantly
praised Beethoven's symphonies, and Gluck's and Weber's operas, and scrupulously refrained from
promoting his own compositions.[60] His journalism consisted mainly of music criticism, some of
which he collected and published, such as Evenings in the Orchestra (1854), but also more technical
articles, such as those that formed the basis of his Treatise on Instrumentation (1844).[6] Despite his
complaints, Berlioz continued writing music criticism for most of his life, long after he had any
financial need to do so.[61][n 12]

Berlioz secured a commission from the French government for his Requiem – the Grande messe des
morts – first performed at Les Invalides in December 1837. A second government commission
followed – the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale in 1840. Neither work brought him much
money or artistic fame at the time,[6] but the Requiem held a special place in his affections: "If I were
threatened with the destruction of the whole of my works save one, I would crave mercy for the Messe
des morts".[63]

One of Berlioz's main aims in the 1830s was "battering down the doors of the Opéra".[64] In Paris at
this period, the musical success that mattered was in the opera house and not the concert hall.[65]
Robert Schumann commented, "To the French, music by itself means nothing".[66] Berlioz worked on
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his opera Benvenuto Cellini from 1834 until 1837, continually

distracted by his increasing activities as a critic and as a promoter
of his own symphonic concerts.[64] The Berlioz scholar D. Kern
Holoman comments that Berlioz rightly regarded Benvenuto
Cellini as a work of exceptional exuberance and verve, deserving a
better reception than it received. Holoman adds that the piece was
of "surpassing technical difficulty", and that the singers were not
especially co-operative.[64] A weak libretto and unsatisfactory
staging exacerbated the poor reception.[65] The opera had only
Poster for the premiere of
four complete performances, three in September 1838 and one in
Benvenuto Cellini, September 1838.
January 1839. Berlioz said that the failure of the piece meant that
Berlioz's name is not mentioned.
the doors of the Opéra were closed to him for the rest of his career
– which they were, except for a commission to arrange a Weber
score in 1841.[67][68]

Shortly after the failure of the opera, Berlioz had a great success as composer-conductor of a concert
at which Harold in Italy was given again. This time Paganini was present in the audience; he came on
to the platform at the end and knelt in homage to Berlioz and kissed his hand.[69][n 13] A few days later
Berlioz was astonished to receive a cheque from him for 20,000 francs.[71][n 14] Paganini's gift enabled
Berlioz to pay off Harriet's and his own debts, give up music criticism for the time being, and
concentrate on composition. He wrote the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette for voices, chorus
and orchestra. It was premiered in November 1839 and was so well received that Berlioz and his huge
instrumental and vocal forces gave two further performances in rapid succession.[73][n 15] Among the
audiences was the young Wagner, who was overwhelmed by its revelation of the possibilities of
musical poetry,[74] and who later drew on it when composing Tristan und Isolde.[75]

At the close of the decade Berlioz achieved official recognition in the form of appointment as deputy
librarian of the Conservatoire and as an officer of the Legion of Honour.[76] The former was an
undemanding post, but not highly paid, and Berlioz remained in need of a reliable income to allow
him the leisure for composition.[77]

1840s: Struggling composer

The Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, marking the tenth anniversary of

the 1830 Revolution, was performed in the open air under the direction
of the composer in July 1840.[76] The following year the Opéra
commissioned Berlioz to adapt Weber's Der Freischütz to meet the
house's rigid requirements: he wrote recitatives to replace the spoken
dialogue and orchestrated Weber's Invitation to the Dance to provide the
obligatory ballet music.[68] In the same year he completed settings of six
poems by his friend Théophile Gautier, which formed the song cycle Les
Nuits d'été (with piano accompaniment, later orchestrated).[78] He also
worked on a projected opera, La Nonne sanglante (The Bloody Nun), to a
libretto by Eugène Scribe, but made little progress.[79] In November 1841
Berlioz in 1845
he began publishing a series of sixteen articles in the Revue et gazette
musicale giving his views about orchestration; they were the basis of his
Treatise on Instrumentation, published in 1843.[80]

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