Born: 1813, La Côte-St-André, Isère, France
Died: 1869. Paris, France
As a French composer, conductor and writer on music. Hector Berlioz played a decisively leading role in the development of orchestral program music and was a great master of modern orchestration.
In his own words…”To render my musical works properly requires a combination of extreme precision and irresistible verve, a regulated vehemence, a dreamy tenderness, and an almost morbid sense of melancholy.”
The overwhelming majority of Romantic composers were pianists. Many, such as Chopin and Liszt, were virtuoso performers as well as composers. Hector Berlioz was a notable exception to this rule. In fact, he never studied piano. Berlioz was born to a well-to-do family and as a child learned flute and guitar and managed to teach himself the rudiments of harmony from his reading of textbooks. His parents sent him to Paris in 1821 to study medicine (his father was a doctor), but after two years (miserable years by Berlioz’s account) he left his studies behind to attend classes at the conservatory.
As a boy he learned the flute, guitar and, from treatises alone, harmony (he never studied the piano); his first compositions were romances and small chamber pieces. After two unhappy years as a medical student in Paris (1821-1823) he abandoned the career chosen for him by his father and turned decisively to music, attending Le Sueur’s composition class at the Conservatoire. He entered for the Prix de Rome four times (1827-1830) 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 (1831-1832) were significant more for his absorption of warmth, vivacity and local color than for the official works he wrote there: he moved out of Rome as often as possible and worked on a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique (Le retour à la vie, renamed Lélio in 1855) and overtures to King Lear and Rob Roy, returning to Paris early to promote his music. Although the 1830s and early 1840s saw a flow of major compositions – Harold en Italie, Benvenuto Cellini, Grande messe des morts, Roméo et Juliette, Grande symphonie funebre et triomphale, Les nuits d’été – 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. From 1834 onward, he wrote chiefly for the Gazette musicale and the ]ournal des débats.
As the discouragements of Paris increased, however, performances and recognition abroad beckoned: between 1842 and 1863 Berlioz spent most of his time touring, in Germany, Austria, Russia, England and elsewhere. Hailed as an advanced composer, he also became known as a leading modern conductor. He produced literary works (notably the Mémoires) and another series of musical masterpieces – La damnation de Faust, the Te Deum, L’enfance du Christ, the vast epic Les troyens (1856-1858; partly performed, 1863) and Béatrice et Bénédict (1860-1862) – meanwhile enjoying happy if short-lived relationships with Liszt and Wagner. The loss of his father, his son Louis (1834-1867), two wives, two sisters and friends merely accentuated the weary decline of his last years, marked by his spiritual isolation from Parisian taste and the new music of Germany alike.
A lofty idealist with a leaping imagination, Berlioz was subject to violent emotional changes from enthusiasm to misery; only his sharp wit saved him from morbid self-pity over the disappointments in his private and professional life. 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 idée 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 Roméo et Juliette, are all characteristic in their mixture of genres. Of his other orchestral works, the overture Le carnaval romain stands out as one of the most extrovert and brilliant. Among the choral works, Faust and L’enfance du Christ combine dramatic action and philosophic reilection, while the Requiem and Te Deum exploit to the full Berlioz’s most spacious, ceremonial style.
During his studies at the conservatory, Berlioz competed for the Prix de Rome four times, finally winning it in 1830. It was in this same year that he wrote his most famous piece, the Symphonie fantastique. During this period, he was profoundly influenced by the music of Beethoven (whom he later championed as a critic) and the writings of Shakespeare, Goethe, and the English Romantics. He also came under the spell of the famous Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson; the story behind the Symphonie fantastique is in part a reflection of his uncontrollable feelings for her. He married her after his return from Rome, but it was a short-lived and troubled marriage. Nonetheless, these years were marked by a string of exceptional and original works, including the programmatic works Harold in Italy and Romeo and Juliet (the first essentially a viola concerto, the second a symphony), his gigantic Requiem and the opera Benvenuto Cellini.
These works were perhaps too original. They did not receive their just recognition and Berlioz turned to musical journalism to support himself. He also began extensive tours as a conductor. Despite the demands of this schedule, he also produced a series of mature masterpieces, among them the operas Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, the dramatic choral work The Damnation of Faust, and the oratorio L’enfance du Christ. His final years were marked by personal tragedy. This was compounded as Berlioz saw the ideals of French Romanticism overtaken by the growing influence of the new German school led by Wagner and others. He died at the age of sixty-seven.
Berlioz stands out for his innovative approach in almost all areas of composition. His Symphonie fantastique, for example, transformed the abstract form of the symphony into a fully dramatic one. His Requiem infused the ancient text with a new and purely nineteenth century meaning. It was, however, in the area of orchestration that he made his most important mark. His original manner of using and combining instruments was based not on tradition, but on an intuitive sense of what was possible and how it could be most effectively realized. He left for future generations not only the example of his works, but the first textbook of orchestration, resources that have served musicians for well over a century.
Though Berlioz’s compositional style has long been considered idiosyncratic, it can be seen to rely on an abundance of both technique and inspiration. Typical are the expansive melodies of irregular phrase lengths, sometimes with a slight chromatic inflection, and an expressive, though not tonally adventurous harmonic structure. Freely contrapuntal textures predominate, used to a variety of fine effects including superimposition of separate themes; a striking boldness in rhythmic articulation gives the music much of its vitality. Berlioz left perhaps his most indelible mark as an orchestrator, finding innumerable and subtle ways to combine and contrast instruments (both on stage and off), effectively emancipating the procedure of orchestration for generations of later composers. As a critic he admired, above all, Gluck and Beethoven. He expressed doubts about Wagner and fought endlessly against the second-rate in his contemporaries.
Hector Berlioz’s musical embodiment of the supreme love of his life, Harriet Smithson, was the “idee fixe” theme of the autobiographical Symphonie fantastique. On September 11, 1827, Berlioz attended a performance of Hamlet at the Odeon Theatre in which the Irish-born actress, Harriet Smithson, performed the role of Ophelia. Overwhelmed by her beauty and charismatic stage presence, he fell desperately in love. Artist that he was, Berlioz found a way to channel the enormous emotional upheaval of l’affaire Smithson into something he could control – a “fantastic symphony” that took as its subject the experiences of a young musician in love.
More than the sublimation of his obsession with an unattainable woman, the Symphonie fantastique was also Berlioz’s attempt to get her attention. It took shape in his mind during the course of 1829 and was set down in a period of about six weeks, from early March to mid-April of 1830. For the Marche au supplice, Berlioz recycled the Marche des Gardes from his ill-fated opera Les francs-juges, linking it to the symphony with a fleeting reference to the idee fixe. This device, which was to attain significance in the works of Franz Liszt and later on in the music of numerous Russian composers, is just one aspect of the revolutionary treatment of melody Berlioz introduces in the Symphonie fantastique. More remarkable still are the score’s formal audacity and brilliantly innovative orchestration, which together make it one of the seminal works of French Romanticism.
The detailed program, written by Berlioz himself and published prior to the work’s premiere, leaves no doubt that he conceived of Symphonie fantastique as a romantically heightened self-portrait.
The Concert Program
I. Reveries — Passions
A young musician, afflicted with that moral complaint which a celebrated writer [Chateaubriand] calls “undirected emotionalism,” sees the woman of his dreams and falls hopelessly in love. Each time her image comes into his mind, it evokes a musical thought [represented by an idee fixe] that is impassioned in character, but also noble and shy, as he imagines her to be.
II. A Ball
The artist finds himself in the swirl of a party, but the beloved image appears before him and troubles his soul.
III. Scene in the Country
In the distance, two shepherds play a ranz des vaches in dialogue [solo oboe and English horn]. The pastoral setting, the gentle evening breeze, the hopeful feelings he has begun to have–all conspire to bring to his spirit an unaccustomed calm, and his thoughts take on a more cheerful cast. He hopes not to be lonely much longer. But his happiness is disturbed by dark premonitions. What if she is deceiving him! One of the shepherds resumes his playing, but the other makes no response…. In the distance, thunder. Solitude. Silence.
IV. March to the Scaffold.
Convinced that his love is unrequited, the artist takes an overdose of opium. It plunges him into a sleep accompanied by horrifying visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, has been condemned and led to the scaffold, and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to a march that is now somber and savage, now brilliant and solemn. At its conclusion the idee fixe returns, like a final thought of the beloved cut, off by the fatal blow.
V. Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
He sees himself in the midst of a frightful throng of ghosts, witches, monsters of every kind, who have assembled for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, bursts of laughter, distant cries. The beloved melody again reappears, but it has lost its modesty and nobilty; it is no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque; it is she, coming to the sabbath. A joyous roar greets her arrival. She joins in the devilish orgy…. A funeral knell, a parody of the Dies irae from the Requiem Mass. A sabbath round-dance. The Dies irae and the round-dance are combined.