Hector Berlioz

One of the greatest composers of the Romantic era, Hector Berlioz struggled to gain acceptance in France, where he was admired elsewhere, but posterity has given him a place of honour thanks to works such as the Symphonie fantastique and the Requiem, or the operas Roméo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust. Hector Berlioz was born on December 11, 1803 in Côte-Saint-André, Isère, where his father practiced medicine. As a young man, he learned to play the flageolet, flute and guitar, unusual instruments for the great composers of his time. He studied the music theory treatises of Rameau, Catel and d'Alembert to create his first scores, such as the Quintette avec flûte. With a baccalauréat, he arrived in Paris in 1821 to study medicine to satisfy his father, but preferred to attend the Opéra and indulge his admiration for Gluck. He continued to learn composition with Jean-François Lesueur, and embarked on the creation of a Messe solennelle, which he had performed at his own expense in the church of Saint-Roch on July 10, 1825, before composing his first opera, Les Francs-Juges (1826). After an unsuccessful attempt at the Prix de Rome the following year, Berlioz realized that to gain acceptance in the music world, the Conservatoire was an absolute must, and so he submitted to the exercise, returning to Lesueur and studying counterpoint and fugue with Anton Reicha, but his second attempt at the Concours de Rome with La Mort d'Orphée proved another failure. While attending performances of Shakespeare'sHamlet and Romeo and Juliet at the Théâtre de l'Odéon, he fell in love with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, then discovered Goethe's Faust, which also had a major influence on his choice of musical programs, starting with Huit scène de Faust. Finally, his third attempt at the Concours de Rome brought him a second prize with the cantata Hermine in 1828. He tried again for the grand prize with La Mort de Cléopâtre, without success, but finally won in 1830 with La Mort de Sardanapale, premiered on October 30. The same year saw the composition of Symphonie fantastique, subtitled "Épisode de la vie d'un artiste" ("Episode in the life of an artist"), whose first performance was given on December 5 in the Salle du Conservatoire, in front of a delighted Liszt. Its original five-scene structure, progressing from reverie to phantasmagorical visions, is criss-crossed by an "idée fixe", a leitmotif before its time. The world would have to wait to discover this masterpiece, for in March 1831, Berlioz had to leave for the Villa Medici in Rome, from which he returned immediately upon learning that his betrothed, the pianist Camille Moke, had broken off their engagement. On his way back to Nice, he composed the overtures to Le Roi Lear and Rob Roy, then finally returned to Italy, where he wrote Lélio ou le Retour à la vie, a sequel to his symphony. Both works were well received on his return to Paris at the end of 1832, in front of Mrs. Simthson, whom he eventually married in October of the following year. On the strength of his fame, Berlioz accepted Paganini's request to compose a work for viola and orchestra, which was to become Harold en Italie, a rare score of the genre carried by the instrument's poetic voyage. In 1835, Berlioz the music critic entered the scene at the Journal des Débats, and his pen, as enthusiastic as it was acerbic, left no one indifferent. Two years later came the Requiem, premiered on December 5 at Les Invalides. The opera Benvenuto Cellini, on the other hand, was hardly the success Berlioz had hoped for, and quickly disappeared from the bill in 1838. Berlioz then worked on Roméo et Juliette, a "dramatic symphony" presented in 1839 in the presence of Wagner, who applauded it. The composer followed this up with the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale. Just as his long-desired marriage was breaking up, he fell in love with the soprano Marie Recio, who accompanied him on his tours of Belgium and Germany, followed by concerts in Prague and Budapest. He was more celebrated than in Paris, where audiences and critics alike cast a pall over La Damnation de Faust, a "dramatic legend" in which orchestral art is combined with the verses of Goethe. Berlioz, who had improvised as an organizer of Parisian festivals, had lost a lot of money and was now in debt. In 1847, he embarked on a tour of Russia, where, by contrast, he was triumphantly welcomed, as was Benvenuto Cellini in Weimar, given on Liszt's initiative. In 1854, Harriet Smithson died and he married Marie Recio. The same year, he won back the French public with the oratorio L'Enfance du Christ, followed by the Te Deum in 1855. Elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1856, three years later Berlioz completed the opera Les Troyens, which was not performed until 1863, after the premiere of Béatrice et Benedict in Baden-Baden the previous year. Meanwhile, the death of his second wife plunged him into turmoil. He left the Journal des Débats in 1864, and his thirty-year-old son Louis died of yellow fever in Havana. Ill, Berlioz nevertheless planned a trip to Russia, but on his return, at the end of 1868, he never left his bed and died on March 8, 1869. Ahead of his time, Berlioz was not always understood, even though he embodied so much of Romanticism in his passion and ardor, present in his works in the same way as his vision of the orchestra, rich in timbre, powerful in its ruptures and dynamics, audacious in its harmonic developments. Very early on, he opened himself up to other cultures, Italian, English and Germanic, making him a European creator in tune with the times.

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