Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz
File:Berliozpaint.gif Portrait of Berlioz by Signol, 1832
Born
December 11, 1803 La Côte-Saint-André, France
Died
March 8, 1869 Paris, France

Louis Hector Berlioz (December 11, 1803 – March 8, 1869) was a French Romantic composer best known for the Symphonie fantastique, first performed in 1830, and for his Grande Messe des Morts (Requiem) of 1837, with its tremendous orchestral resources that include four antiphonal brass choirs.

Life and Studies

File:Legros - Berlioz (dessin).jpg

Berlioz, by Alphonse Legros

Early Years

Hector Berlioz was born in France at La Côte-Saint-André, situated between Lyon and Grenoble. His father was a physician, and young Hector was sent to Paris to study medicine at the age of eighteen. He was strongly attracted to the pursuit of his musical genius and started visiting opera performances. Once he obtained his medical qualification, he decided to follow his true liking — music, despite his parents' disapproval. His mother had a strong feeling against musicians and actors, holding them 'abominable creatures excommunicated by the Church and therefore predestined to eternal damnation'. steen 311. She sent him off on his musical rendezvous with words: 'Go and wallow in the filth of Paris, sully your name, and kill your father and me with sorrow and shame!' steen 311

Fortunately, the father took pity and supported his son for a trial period. This enabled Berlioz to take private lessons from the director of the Chapel Royal, Le Sueur, a specialist in vocal music, who proved to be Hector’s much needed moral and financial support, and from the Czech colleague of Beethoven, Antonin Reicha, who endorsed innovation. His orchestration skills were self-taught, by following the score while watching the opera. He followed the score so religiously that he would protest loudly whenever there was a change in orchestration, much to the dismay of the audience. He then attended Conservatoire de Paris, studying opera and composition.

In an effort to fund his studies, he competed for Prix de Rome, a musical endowment established by the French government to sponsor promising young French artists under 30 in their studies for five. This prize was handed out not only in music but also in painting, architecture, sculpture, and engraving. The winner received 3,000 francs for each year and had to pledge to spend the first two years at the French Academy in Rome and the third year in Germany. Claude Debussy was one of the winners. However, the Prix de Rome was eluding the young Berlioz, which compelled his father to the termination of the allowance.

With the money not trickling in, Berlioz was forced to look for a job, and he started giving flute and guitar lessons. In addition to this, he wrote articles. Early on he became identified with the French Romantic movement and became friends with writers such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Honoré de Balzac. Later, Théophile Gautier wrote, "Hector Berlioz seems to me to form with Hugo and Delacroix the Trinity of Romantic Art." Then in 1830 he finally won the Prix de Rome.

Love Life

Berlioz is said to have been innately romantic, experiencing emotions deeply from early childhood. This manifested itself in his weeping at passages of Virgil as a child, and later in his love affairs. At the age of 23, his initially unrequited love for the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Constance Smithson became the inspiration for his Symphonie fantastique. Harriet was described as a mediocre actress who relied on overacting to disguise the weak voice and lack of skill. However, the fascinating characters of her plays made her audiences fall in love with her; the king sent her a gift. Berlioz fell in love with her at the first sight during her performance.

Harriet would not respond to his passes and would not come to the concerts of his works. He would write her overly passionate letters, which only prompted her to refuse his advances. However, the symphony which these emotions are said to inspire was received very well, considered startling and vivid. Besides, the autobiographic nature of this piece of program music met with sensation at that time, merely three years after Beethoven's death. Then Harriet’s career and the famed looks took a turn for the worse, and she finally attended a performance of the Symphonie Fantastique. She quickly realized that it was his depiction of his passionate letters to her. This was year 1833, Berlioz was back in Paris from his two years’ studies in Rome, and marriage to Smithson has finally materialized.

However, only a few years down the road, the relationship degraded, a fact partly attributed to her possessiveness and their severe personality and temperament clashes. In 1842 he became romantically involved with a second-rate mezzo-soprano Marie Recio, who was described as 'a bossy shrew' steen 326 and insisted on singing in his concerts. Unhappy with the way their relationship was developing, Berlioz made an attempt to return to Harriet a year later but by that time she had been reduced to an overweight alcoholic who neglected her looks. Divorce was illegal at that time but separation was possible, and Hector and Harriet chose this option in 1844. They had a son together, Louis. Berlioz married Marie only after Harriet's death in 1854.

Last Years

From 1842 on, he conducted several tours of Europe conducting operas and symphonic music, both his own and composed by others. During his lifetime, he was more famous as a conductor than a composer, and since he was not well received in France, he traveled to those parts of the worldwhere he did received admiration, such as Germany and England. The climax of his career came in Moscow, with Tchaikovsky’s proposal of a toast to him.

From 1852 until his death he held a position of librarian with the Paris Conservatory. In 1856 he was elected member of the French Institut, at the same time developing the symptoms of intestinal neuralgia. He lost a lot of weight and became bitter. In 1866, his son Louis died of fever in Havana. The death of his beloved son, compounded by the unfulfilling second marriage and the nervous ailment, sentenced Berlioz to gloomy last years of his life. His mother-in-law took care of him when he became bedridden and suffering from intense pain. He died aged 65, with the last words as follows: "Enfin, on va jouer ma musique". steen 335 [At last, they will now play my music.] He is buried in the Cimetiere de Montmartre with his two wives.

"Beethoven is dead, and Berlioz alone can revive him"

Thus spoke the virtuoso violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini after hearing Berlioz's Harold in Italy.. Originally, Paganini commissioned Berlioz to compose a viola concerto, intending to premiere it as soloist. This became the symphony for viola and orchestra Harold in Italy. Paganini eventually did not premiere the piece, but Berlioz's memoirs recount that once he heard it, he knelt before Berlioz and declared his genius, and the next day offered him 20,000 francs. With this money, Berlioz was able to halt his work as a critic and focus on writing the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette for voices, chorus and orchestra. With the love scenes this piece depicted, he developed a close affinity with it.

Components of Romanticism

Politics in Romanticism was marked by the struggle for freedom; the school of painting, exemplified by J.M.W. Turner replaced the Classicism’s marginal use of color with its indulgence. Opera cultivated lyrical color and contrast as well as the exotic and oriental. Melancholy on one hand and horror on the other were frequent fascinations for the composers of that time. Religion was also celebrated, albeit not in an orthodox ways of Liszt and Schumann. Overall, expressiveness and emotion were of paramount importance, which is why love dominated the themes, although it was often expressed as 'total dedication of a great soul to another' Steen 306 rather than sexual love.

Berlioz himself believed that he was Beethoven's successor because he too purposely broke down the barriers of symphonic music to allow for greater flexibility, was subjective, and strove to make music the voice of human and poetic experience. ewen 429. However, while Beethoven’s breach of traditional rules of structure and content as well as his nonconformist behavior ushered in Romanticism, Berlioz became a symbol, a quintessential composer of Romanticism, described as music's Delacroix or Hugo.

Berlioz’ music was essentially an extension of his life — an overabundance of passion, intensity, turbulence, and neuroticism, and these phenomena coincide with virtually all elements of Romanticism, which sought to replace the simplicity, calm, and conformity of Classicism: the picturesqueness and sense of local and historical color in Benvenuto Cellini and Harold in Italy, Byron’s school in the "Witches' Sabbath", and the melancholy espoused by most French Romantic poets, in Symphonie fantastique. The lyrical quality, however, is more conspicuous in Liszt, as Berlioz's forte was the drama; he treated lyric as secondary. Romeo et Juliette's poetism makes it an archetypal work of Romanticism.

With such an intense internal life, Berlioz would often find himself in the world where there were no boundaries between reality and fantasy. Music was the vehicle of his feelings; it recorded the events of his life and love through the color of musical instruments that he employed. Moreover, he introduced instruments not found in traditional orchestras and increased the size of the orchestra and the combinations of instruments. His achievements in orchestration alone would suffice to guarantee him a position as genius, but he was also a genius of invention. Wagner, Liszt, Strauss, and Debussy would take inspiration from his experimental treatment of the orchestra; Debussy would employ a gargantuan orchestra.

His innovations in music were daring, bordering on iconoclasm, and often foreshadowed new styles and techniques, such as Symphonie fantastique, which is the precursor of List's tone poem. Like Debussy, who introduced non-Western elements into Western music, Berlioz freed rhythm from its fixed structure of two, four, and eight beats and introduced unprecedented irregular patterns and effects. This was naturally viewed as unorthodox and eccentric, while it actually spurred new sources of dynamism.

Music of Romanticism was linked with other arts, particularly literature, where an easy access to novels and poetry allowed composers to come in contact with the spirit of the age. However, since composers were mostly employed by courts, their adoption of Romantic aspirations was not unbridled. Berlioz stood out among his crowd; nobody adopted the elements of Romanticism as eloquently as he did. He would look for inspiration in works of literature, which he would transform to reflect his own feelings through the feelings of the protagonists. Harold, the poet in Symphonie fantastique, as well as others are essentially Berlioz's alter ego. Besides, he would tap into his gift of writing to write detailed program to accompany his works.

Reception Home and Abroad

Berlioz traveled throughout much of the 1840s and 1850s with Marie, and Germany in particular welcomed him. Prague also embraced his talent. In Vienna, pies were named after him and jewelry with his cameos were in fashion. While traveling, he met other leading composers of the age, among them Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner and Brahms. Liszt promoted his works. The rejection by his homeland was very hard for him regardless the acclaim abroad, and he was desperate to obtain a permanent salaried position so he would not have to constantly worry about finances.

The unconventional music of Berlioz irritated the established concert and opera scene. Berlioz had to arrange for his own performances as well as pay for them himself. This took a heavy toll on him financially and emotionally. He had a core audience of about 1,200 loyal attendees, but the nature of his large works—sometimes involving hundreds of performers—made financial success difficult. His journalistic abilities became essential for him to make a living and he survived as a witty critic emphasizing the importance of drama and expressivity in musical entertainment. (Kamien 243)

the music of Berlioz has often been cited as extremely influential in the development of the symphonic form, instrumentation, and the depiction in music of programmatic ideas, features central to musical Romanticism. He was considered extremely modern for his day, and he Wagner and Liszt are sometimes considered the great trinity of progressive 19th century romanticism. Richard Pohl, the German critic in Schumann's old paper, the Neue Zeitschrift fur musik called Berlioz "the true pathbreaker", Liszt was an enthusiastic performer and supporter, and Wagner himself, after first expressing great reservations about Berlioz, wrote to Liszt saying: "we, Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner, are three equals, but we must take care not to say so to him." As Wagner here implies, Berlioz himself was indifferent to the idea of what was called the "Music of the Future", and clearly influenced both Liszt and Wagner (and other forward looking composers) although never an admirer of their works.

However, On the home turf, however, he was neglected for much of the nineteenth century, In 1844 he was cartooned as a purveyor of noise for his giant concert for the Festival de l'Industrie with 1,000 performers, 24 horns, 25 harps and other instruments. steen 328 He watched with sadness others being elected to positions he had coveted, and he received abusive treatment at his performances. The jeers and catcalls during Les Troyens prompted his leading biographer to a remark that it was thone of the most astonishing musical scandals of all time'. steen 333 In 1844, Berlioz wrote: 'I belong to a noation which has ceased to be interested in the nobler manifestations of intelleigence, and whose only deity is the golden calf. The Parisians have become a barbarous people.' steen 333

The music of Berlioz enjoyed a revival during the 1960s and 1970s, due in large part to the efforts of British conductor Colin Davis, who recorded his entire oeuvre, bringing to light a number of Berlioz's lesser-known works. Davis's recording of Les Troyens was the first near-complete recording of that work. The work, which Berlioz never saw staged in its entirety during his life, is now a part of the international repertoire, if still something of a rarity.

In 2003, the bicentenary of Berlioz's birth, a proposal was made to remove his remains to the Panthéon, but it was blocked by President Jacques Chirac in a political dispute over Berlioz's worthiness as a symbol of a republican, since Berlioz, who regularly met kings and princes, had severely criticized the 1848 revolution, speaking of the "odious and stupid republic". Also, Berlioz had wished to remain buried close to his wife, and removing his remains would not have respected this will. In the land of his birth, Berlioz still remains something of a neglected prophet.

A movement of Carnival of the Animals composed in 1886 by Camille Saint-Saëns, L'Éléphant, uses a theme from Hector Berlioz's Danse des sylphes played on a double bass.

Legacy

Berlioz had a keen affection for literature, and many of his best compositions are inspired by literary works. For Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz was inspired in part by Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. For La damnation de Faust, Berlioz drew on Goethe's Faust; for Harold in Italy, he drew on Byron's Childe Harold; for Benvenuto Cellini, he drew on Cellini's own autobiography. For Roméo et Juliette, Berlioz turned, of course, to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. For his magnum opus, the monumental opera Les Troyens, Berlioz turned to Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid. For his last opera, the comic opera Béatrice et Bénédict, Berlioz prepared a libretto based loosely on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.

Apart from the many literary influences, Berlioz also championed Beethoven who was at the time unknown in France. The performance of the "Eroica" symphony in Paris seems to have been a turning point for Berlioz's compositions. Next to those of Beethoven, Berlioz showed deep reverence for the works of Gluck, Mozart, Étienne Méhul, Carl Maria von Weber and Gaspare Spontini, as well as respect for those of Rossini, Meyerbeer and Verdi.

Curiously perhaps, the adventures in chromaticism of his prominent contemporaries and associates Frederic Chopin and Richard Wagner seemed to have little effect on Berlioz's style.

Works of music and literature

File:Berliozl.jpg

Photograph by Karl Reutlinger, 1864

Musical works

• Symphonie fantastique(1830) ... written when he was 27, it departs from the language of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Shcubert. This work opened up a new notion of sound with its detailed and literal program and the fantasy and macabre and the psychological, with its vast size of the orchestra and the turbulence of emotion. It coincides with his romance with Smithson who would not acknowledge him. When he heard disturbing news of her, he turned the heroine into a courtesan.

King Lear (1831) - written in Italy, where he wo the Prix de Rome and found out that his fiance, who took the place of Smithson after she refused to meet with him, had married another man. He was ready to kill the couple and commit sucicidde afterwads but turned this experience into a learning one and wrote the overture to King Lear. "And so I drink deep draughts of the sunny, balmy air of Nice, and life and joy return to me, and I dream of music and the future...I wrote the overture to King Lear. I sing. I believe in God. Convalescence!" Ewen 433

• Le corsaire (The Corsair), overture for orchestra, op. 21 (1831)
• Overture to Benvenuto Cellini, for orchestra, op. 23 (1837)
• Harold en Italie (Harold in Italy), symphony for orchestra with solo viola, op. 16
• Grand Messe des morts (Requiem), for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, op. 5 (1837)
• Romeo et Juliette, dramatic symphony for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, op. 17 (1839)
• Le carnaval Romain (Roman Carnival Overture), for orchestra, op. 9 (1844)
• La damnation de Faust (The Damnation of Faust), dramatic legend for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, op. 24 (1846)
• Te Deum, for chorus and orchestra, op. 22 (1849)
• L'enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ), oratorio for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, op. 25 (1854)
• Les Troyens (The Trojans), opera in five acts (1859)
• Beatrice et Benedict, opera-comique in two acts, with text by the composer, based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing (1862)

...some other works of Berlioz currently in the standard orchestral repertoire include his "légende dramatique" La damnation de Faust and "symphonie dramatique" Roméo et Juliette (symphony) (both large-scale works for mixed voices and orchestra), the song cycle Les nuits d'été (originally for voice and piano, later with an orchestral accompaniment), and his concertante symphony (for viola and orchestra) Harold in Italy, the quasi-liturgical Te Deum, as well as his oratorio L'Enfance du Christ.

The unconventional music of Berlioz irritated the established concert and opera scene. Berlioz had to arrange for his own performances as well as pay for them himself. This took a heavy toll on him financially and emotionally. He had a core audience of about 1,200 loyal attendees, but the nature of his large works—sometimes involving hundreds of performers—made financial success difficult. His journalistic abilities became essential for him to make a living and he survived as a witty critic emphasizing the importance of drama and expressivity in musical entertainment. (Kamien 243)

Literary works

While Berlioz is best known as a composer, he was also a prolific writer, and supported himself for many years writing musical criticism. He wrote in a bold, vigorous style, at times imperious and sarcastic. Evenings With the Orchestra (1852) is a scathing satire of provincial musical life in 19th century France. Berlioz's Memoirs (1870) paints a magisterial portrait of the Romantic era through the eyes of one of its chief protagonists.

A pedagogic work, The Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, established his reputation as a master of orchestration. The work was closely studied by Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss and served as the foundation for a subsequent textbook by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov who as a music student attended the concerts Berlioz conducted in Moscow and St Petersburg. Berlioz was known as 'the man who wrote for 1000 musicians' so he also anticipated the development of gargantuan orchestral forces, although he never sought to use such forces merely for cheap effects or noisiness- he was the first to treat the orchestra idiomatically and systematically. Although he himself was not an instrumental player. According to The Great Conductors, by Harold Schonberg, "No composer before (Berlioz), and in all likelihood none after, not even Mahler, had such a vision of pure sound and how to go about obtaining it. He reveled in new tonal combinations, in the potentiality of every instrument, in a kind of super-music played by a super orchestra." Although he himself was not a skilled instrumental executant. t His work as a conductor was also extremely influential, his clarity and precision evidently exercising influence over the French School of conducting right up to the present, exemplified by such figures as Pierre Monteux, Pierre Boulez, and the French Canadian Charles Dutoit.

Media

Beatrice et Benedict Overture (file info) Problems listening to the files? See media help.

Publications

• Mémoires, Hector Berlioz; Flammarion; (first edition: 1991) ISBN 2-08-212539-4
• The memoirs of Hector Berlioz; Everyman Publishers (second revised edition: 2002) David Cairns (ed.) ISBN 1-85715-231-X
• Louis Jullien, musique,spectacle et folie au XIXe siècle; Editions Atlantica 2006 Michel Faul ISBN 2-35165-038-7

(especially chapter 6)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Kamien, Roger. Music: An Appreciation. Mcgraw-Hill College; 3rd edition (August 1, 1997) ISBN 0-07-036521-0.
• Ewen, David (Edited by). The Complete Book of Classical Music. London: Hale, 1966. ISBN 0-709-03865-8.

External links

• The Hector Berlioz Website
• List of works by Berlioz
• Berlioz cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
• Berlioz's Gravesite
• Roméo et Juliette MP3 Creative Commons Recording
• Hector Berlioz' works: text, concordances and frequency list
• The Louis Jullien site (Louis Jullien was Berlioz employer in England...An eccentric conductor and composer

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