Hector Berlioz |
(b. La Cote-St-Andre, Isere, 11 Dec 1803; d. Paris, 8 March 1869).
French composer. As a boy he learnt the flute, guitar and, from treatises alone, harmony (he never studied the piano); his first compositions were romances and small chamber pieces. He entered for the Prix de Rome four times (1827-30) and finally won. Among the most powerful influences on him were Shakespeare, whose plays were to inspire three major works, and the actress Harriet Smithson, whom he idolized, pursued and, after a bizarre courtship, eventually married (1833). Beethoven's symphonies too made a strong impact, along with Goethe's Faust and the works of Moore, Scott and Byron. The most important product of this time was his startlingly original, five-movement Symphonie fantastique (1830).
Berlioz's 15 months in Italy (1831-2) were significant more for his absorption of warmth, vivacity and local colour than for the official works he wrote there. Although the 1830s and early 1840s saw a flow of major compositions - Harold en Italie, Benvenuto Cellini, Grande messe des morts, Romeo et Juliette, Grande symphonie funebre et triomphale, Les nuits d'ete - his musical career was now essentially a tragic one. He failed to win much recognition, his works were considered eccentric or "incorrect" and he had reluctantly to rely on journalism for a living.
As the discouragements of Paris increased, however, performances and recognition abroad beckoned: between 1842 and 1863 Berlioz spent most of his time touring. Hailed as an advanced composer, he also became known as a leading modern conductor. He produced literary works and another series of musical masterpieces - La damnation de Faust, the Te Deum, L'enfance du Christ, the vast epic Les troyens (1856-8; partly performed, 1863) and Beatrice et Benedict (1860-62) - meanwhile enjoying happy if short-lived relationships with Liszt and Wagner. The loss of his father, his son Louis, two wives, two sisters and friends merely accentuated the weary decline of his last years.
A lofty idealist with a leaping imagination, Berlioz was subject to violent emotional changes from enthusiasm to misery. The intensity of the personality is inextricably woven into the music: all his works reflect something in himself expressed through poetry, literature, religion or drama. Sincere expression is the key - matching means to expressive ends, often to the point of mixing forms and media, ignoring pre-set schemes. In Les troyens, his grand opera on Virgil's Aeneid, for example, aspects of the monumental and the intimate, the symphonic and the operatic, the decorative and the solemn converge. Similarly his symphonies, from the explicitly dramatic Symphonie fantastique with its idee fixe (the theme representing his beloved, changed and distorted in line with the work's scenario), to the picturesque Harold en Italie with its concerto element, to the operatic choral symphony cum tone poem Romeo et Juliette, are all characterFind Hector Berlioz cds and Hector Berlioz records on Philips Records. |
