Cover story: Hector Berlioz
Composer, conductor and critic Hector Berlioz was a man who loved to flout the rules. Roger Nichols celebrates the astounding achievements of a French music revolutionary
Roger Nichols and six leading performers celebrate the unique works of one of music’s great revolutionaries
The significance of the year 1789 has never entirely faded in the memory of the French, as events over these past few months have shown. If Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo put an end to his ambition, Louis XVIII and Charles X, the two brothers who were the figureheads of the ensuing Restoration, were not the sharpest tools in the royal box: the historian Alfred Cobban says of them respectively, ‘Immensely fat and walking only with difficulty, he occupied the throne like an old idol, self-sufficient in divinely sanctioned egoism’; and ‘[he] had forgotten little; in intellectual goods his mind was so sparsely furnished that there was little for him to forget’. Paris in the 1820s became impatient for something better, spurred on by Charles’s rigid belief in the divine right of kings.
ONE GOOD THING Louis had done was to settle a lifetime pension on a young poet called Victor Hugo, not foreseeing the role Hugo would play in fomenting dissent. He did this in particular in the long Preface he wrote to his drama Cromwell which became a manifesto of the new spirit, claiming among other things to be ‘the voice of a solitary apprentice of nature and truth’ and that ‘the beautiful has only one type, the ugly has a thousand’. Readers wondering what Berlioz has to do with all this may be soothed by Hugo’s observation in his Preface that ‘it is the grotesque which impels the ghastly antics of witches’ revels’. Berlioz certainly knew that Preface and was also among the audience for Hugo’s play Hernani on 25 February 1830 which, blatantly mixing tragedy and
Berlioz learnt the flageolet, flute and guitar, but his father forbade the piano
comedy, lasted for 39 increasingly noisy performances, setting die-hards against young radicals. Hugo returned home one night to find a bullet hole in his window. Violence was in the air, and on 27 July Charles X left for exile. And Berlioz?
The young Hector’s education, apart from two years, was entirely at the hands of his father. He learnt the flageolet, the flute and the guitar, but Papa forbade the piano – no one knows why, but Berlioz later was grateful for ‘the luck that made it necessary for me to compose silently and freely, shielding me from the tyranny of digital habits, so dangerous for thought’. Overall the great virtue of this private education, at the hands of someone he revered, was to stimulate his imagination. he read voraciously: Virgil above all, the story of Dido and Aeneas prompting his great opera some 40 years later, but also Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper and, later on, Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare who, like Hugo, had the bad manners to mix high and low life, Danish princes and gravediggers. From his village near Grenoble, Hector dreamt of travelling to exotic places and being ‘the voice of the solitary apprentice of nature and truth’, with the accent on ‘solitary’. Here was born the lonely dreamer, escaping from all that was vulgar and humdrum into a more perfect world – which is to say, a world designed by him for himself.
And here lay the deficiency of his education. As he himself later admitted, as a single boy with two younger sisters, he never had to learn the arts of negotiation and compromise (Mendelssohn had the same problems for the same reason). His father, a conscientious and much loved doctor, was not to be argued with. Still less was his mother, a staunch Catholic in the ancient mould. And those who know Berlioz’s music will not be surprised that music would be the first and worst cause of dissension between old and young. In an attempt to please Papa, Berlioz went to Paris and began medical studies, but blood and severed limbs were too much for him. Back home, he announced that he was going to be a composer. His mother who, in his own words, thought ‘I was setting foot on a path that led to disrepute in this world and damnation in the next’, shrieked at him to ‘go and drag yourself through the filth of Paris, dishonour your name, leave your father and mother to die of shame and misery. You are no longer my son ! I curse you!’
It could well be that from this encounter above all Berlioz learnt to be his own man, a lesson that brought triumph and unhappiness in about equal measure.
Against his imaginings were ranged the realities of Paris music making, in which figures like Auber, Cherubini and Rossini held pride of place, and the young were expected to know theirs.
Nonetheless, on 5 December 1830, some four months after the last king of France had been expelled and with the Prix de Rome in Berlioz’s pocket after several attempts, the world first heard his Symphonie fantastique. A symphony, fine. But a ‘fantastic symphony’? Sure, the Beethoven symphonies that were at last being played in Paris were not all easy listening, some indeed were deemed incomprehensible, but they weren’t ‘fantastic’. Well, this one was.
For a start, this was the first symphony ever to figure the composer as subject. He falls in love; whenever his thoughts turn to his beloved the same theme comes to mind; she haunts him at a ball and in the countryside; under the influence of opium he dreams that he has killed her and is being led to the scaffold; finally he is present among witches at his own funeral. Such revolutionary ideas clearly called for unconventional music, and Berlioz obliged. Take the theme of the beloved – since it reappears regularly throughout the symphony, it has become known as the ‘idée fixe’. Since it’s 32 bars long, you can, if you try hard, split it up into four regular eight-bar patterns. But that’s not what we hear: there are ellipses and expansions, as well as two accelerandos and a rallentando, so that the whole theme radiates instability. The accompaniment too is initially grotesque, a scratchy figure on strings that doesn’t start till the seventh bar, then stops, then starts again, then stops, like an old car in cold weather. The ball theme, though it begins traditionally, and most attractively, soon undergoes similar treatment that would fox any dancer. ‘The Scene in the Fields’ finds the composer reflecting on his isolation, which may soon be over. But does she really love him ? ‘These ideas of happiness disturbed by black presentiments form the subject’ of the movement. here Berlioz was remembering Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and the ‘black presentiments’, painted by dissonant thunder on timpani, relate to the cello and double bass passages in the Pastoral where, as Berlioz later remarked, the five rising notes on low cellos are messily matched with four on double basses: here music is giving way to sheer noise.
Noise and disruption are much in evidence in the last two movements. In ‘The March to the Scaffold’, complete with guillotine cutting off the head of the ‘idée fixe’, two chords alternating four times are enough to proclaim ‘revolution’: D flat major against G minor, D flat to G being ‘the devil’s interval’. As for ‘The Witches’ Sabbath’ and the screeched version of the ‘idée fixe’ on E-flat clarinet, ‘ignoble, trivial and grotesque’ says Berlioz, here was the Cromwell preface in sound. A final blow to convention came with the quotation of the Dies Irae plainsong, Berlioz having long abandoned religion, no doubt partly
aided by his mother’s intransigence. If one of the aims of revolution is to point a path to the future, then this use of the Dies Irae did just that, the theme being taken up by any number of composers over the last couple of centuries, including Liszt, Ysaÿe and Rachmaninov, to name but three.
The clash between Berlioz’s imagination and the realities of life took many forms. With regard to the Fantastic Symphony, it was embodied in his real-life love for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson whom he had seen as Ophelia and Juliet in 1827 and who was the unwitting object of the Symphony. In his memoirs, a heading tells the story in brief: ‘I am introduced to Miss Smithson. She is ruined. She breaks her leg. I marry her.’ A careful lover would have realised that one’s abilities to convey passion on stage are not necessarily the qualities required for a comfortable companion. Her acting never rose to the same heights again and Berlioz looked after her for the rest of her life. Then, of course, there was the nature of his music itself. Those parts of it that still strike us as exciting tended to strike the performers of the time as terrifying. His first opera, Benvenuto Cellini, is still taxing today, not least for its complex rhythms. After some early shocks, he took to conducting his music himself, and here again an unwillingness to negotiate could cause problems. With German and British orchestras he was in general happy, and Sir Colin Davis’s sensational, epoch-making engagement with his music would not have surprised him. But Parisian ones were a different matter. Saint-saëns, writing in 1899, remembered that Berlioz ‘demanded, from orchestras far inferior to those of today, efforts that were positively superhuman. I have seen him take 20, 30 rehearsals for a single work, tearing his hair, wrecking batons and music stands, without getting the result he wanted. The poor orchestral players did everything they could, but the task was beyond them.’
Then, as mentioned already, there was the whole contentious matter of noise. A good idea, he sometimes seemed to be saying, could only be made better by being played more loudly, though that certainly was not always the case, as in the song cycle Nuits d’été which was complicit in launching the mélodie as a purveyor of serious music. Size of musical forces of course entailed money, the lack of which was an ‘idée fixe’ in Berlioz’s life. The massive outlays for the
Requiem and the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale were paid for by the state, but otherwise the
‘I have seen him tearing his hair, wrecking batons and music stands’
mature composer was a revolutionary in that he organised, conducted and paid for almost all the concerts he gave in Paris. As ever, this was a hit-and-miss affair: La damnation de Faust was a total flop, leaving him pretty well bankrupt (‘nothing in my artistic career has so grievously wounded me as this unexpected indifference’), while the gentler L’enfance du Christ was a huge success. To the end of his life he regretted an A minor Symphony whose details came to him in dreams two nights running, but which he dared not write down, knowing the problems such an enterprise would entail. By the third night the music had vanished into thin air...
A final arena in which imagination and reality clashed was that of words. From 1835 Berlioz was for nearly 30 years a contributor of reviews and articles to the influential Journal des débats. He cursed the labour this entailed and the music that consequently he never wrote, but the money was needed and it did give him a forum for his ideas including, less helpfully, those on the music of his colleagues. He maintained, rather curiously, that those who really took umbrage at his slights were not those whose music he castigated, nor indeed ignored, but those whom he damned with faint praise. At all events he tended to shoot from the hip and, in intellectual Paris which has often been likened to a nest of snakes (or, by Berlioz, to ‘a stinking bog’), this did him no favours. Few Parisians would have welcomed his view, expressed in another publication a few years earlier, that ‘in the bushman as in the peasant, melodic feeling is sometimes accompanied by a very acute sense of expression, which, in contrast, occurs only seldom among city dwellers.’ No surprise therefore that none of his three operas was performed by the Paris Opéra in his lifetime. Les Troyens finally received this accolade in 1921.
To his last days he cherished improvements to the way music was organised and played, especially in Paris. The Conservatoire should have classes in conducting and (modestly not mentioning his own Traité d’instrumentation) in orchestration (it did – by 1914); and singers everywhere should have classes in rhythm. His legacy has always been contested in some quarters, and we may find some wry amusement in the efforts of his successors to understand him: Fauré evincing distaste for the ‘mediocre themes, Baroque in form and vulgar in sonority’ of the Benvenuto Cellini overture and being rapped over the knuckles by Saint-saëns; Debussy finding the Fantastic Symphony a masterpiece but lamenting Berlioz’s penchant for ‘artificial flowers’; Ravel calling him ‘a genius who knew everything by instinct, except what every Conservatoire student can do on the spot: write a decent bass line to a waltz’. More happily Pierre Citron, the editor of Berlioz’s Correspondance, invites us, through reading his memoirs, to ‘discern, sometimes displayed openly, sometimes more discreetly, the face and voice of an artist who was free, proud, honest, demanding: a prince.’
Berlioz tended to shoot from the hip, and in Paris this did him no favours