Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803 at La Côte-Saint-André in the Isère, the son of a cultivated doctor, Louis Berlioz. He grew up far from the great musical centres and never really learned the piano. His father taught him Latin, geography and literature and introduced him to Virgil: the story of Dido and Aeneas overwhelmed him from childhood. He taught himself the flute, the guitar and the rules of harmony from treatises, and composed his first romances.

In 1821 his father sent him to Paris to study medicine. But the sight of the dissecting rooms disgusted him, and he spent his evenings at the Opéra, where he passionately discovered the works of Gluck. Against the wishes of his parents, who cut off his allowance, he abandoned medicine for music. He studied with the composer Jean-François Lesueur, then entered the Conservatoire in 1826, where he also attended Anton Reicha’s classes. He earned his living singing in a theatre chorus.

In 1827 he attended a performance of Hamlet by an English company and fell madly in love with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, who played Ophelia. She did not even know he existed. This passion inspired the Symphonie fantastique of 1830, subtitled “Episode in the Life of an Artist”: a young musician, desperate with love, poisons himself with opium and dreams he witnesses his own execution, then a witches’ sabbath. The beloved is represented by a melody that returns in every movement, the “idée fixe”. It was a revolution in orchestral music.

That same year, at his fifth attempt, he won the Prix de Rome and stayed in Italy at the Villa Medici. Back in Paris he finally married Harriet Smithson in 1833, but the marriage was unhappy and the couple separated some years later. In 1834 Paganini commissioned a work for viola from him: the result was Harold in Italy, inspired by Byron. In 1837 the government commissioned the Grande Messe des morts, which uses a huge orchestra, four brass ensembles placed at the four corners and sixteen timpani.

Berlioz struggled for recognition in France, where his music was thought too loud and too strange. His opera Benvenuto Cellini was a failure in 1838. To earn a living he became a music critic, notably for the Journal des débats, where he wrote brilliant and often funny articles. He composed the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839) and in 1844 published his Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration, which describes every instrument of the orchestra and became a reference for composers worldwide.

He was, however, very successful abroad as a conductor: Germany, Austria, Russia, England. He was one of the first great modern conductors. In 1846 he composed La Damnation de Faust, after Goethe, poorly received in Paris. He then wrote L’Enfance du Christ (1854), which finally brought him success in France, and spent several years on his grand opera Les Troyens, after Virgil, completed in 1858. He never saw it staged complete: only part was performed in 1863.

His last years were darkened by bereavement: the deaths of Harriet, then of his second wife Marie Recio, and finally of his son Louis, a sailor, in 1867. Exhausted and ill, he died in Paris on 8 March 1869 and was buried in Montmartre Cemetery. His Memoirs, published after his death, are one of the great autobiographical texts of Romanticism. Long misunderstood in France, Berlioz is now regarded as one of the greatest French composers and the genius of the Romantic orchestra.