Berlioz: the perfect, thwarted Romantic
Ivan Hewett explains how the colourful life of the great French composer, who died 150 years ago, fuelled his magnificent music
It took a long time for the great French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz to win his place among the immortals. When he died in 1869 he was a broken and embittered man, worn out from decades of struggle to get his music heard. His great opera The
Trojans had been seen only once, in a mangled version, a fact that broke his heart. The contrast with that other great Romantic, Richard Wagner, who learnt so much from Berlioz, is painful. By the time of his death, Wagner could boast that he had his own theatre, and a whole school of devoted Wagnerites all round the world. When Berlioz died he was forgotten, washed away by the great tide of Wagnerism. The next generation of French composers such as Debussy and Ravel rejected him as a literary man who dabbled – incompetently – in music, and his emergence from oblivion was slow.
The Trojans was not finally published until a hundred years after his death.
Now Berlioz’s position as one of the great Romantic composers is assured. Indeed some would say that he is the Romantic composer par excellence, because of the way his music constantly subverts expectations and break rules, in the effort to capture the intensity of a scene or an image. Indeed, his imagination needed the stimulus of something grand, poetic or diabolical to stimulate it. One neverending source of inspiration was his own extraordinarily colourful life.
He was born in 1803 in a provincial French town near Grenoble, and the wild landscape around his home, which was within sight of the Alps, is something he always cherished. Then at the age of 12, he met a girl who was to be the love of his life – though only at a distance. “The moment I beheld her, I was conscious of an electric shock: I loved her. From then on I lived in a daze,” he wrote in his autobiography, Mémoires, decades later. She was seven years older, and Berlioz hardly dared to approach her.
Berlioz soon moved to Paris, his home for the rest of his life, but the vision of “Estelle of the little pink boots” haunted him for ever, and soon led to one of his earliest compositional efforts, an opera based on the story of
Estelle et Némorin. He also composed an “intensely sad song” that eventually found its way into the opening of the
Symphonie Fantastique, that original portrayal of erotic obsession, which is still Berlioz’s most popular work. However, it is not only his passion for Estelle that shapes that piece; there is also the thunderbolt of his encounter with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom he later married.
The Symphonie Fantastique is not the only piece of Berlioz prompted by an amorous encounter. He had a brief affair with the pianist Camille Moke, who dumped him when her mother found a better qualified and richer suitor. Berlioz poured out his disappointment and thwarted passion in Lélio, the sequel to the
Symphonie Fantastique. There were other encounters too – a mysterious Amélie whom he met in Montmartre, and flings with numerous chorus girls, one of whom became his mistress, and even a Russian singer he met on his first trip to the country. These relationships he passes over in silence in Mémoires, because they didn’t fire his creativity; which is also why he doesn’t mention his second wife Marie Récio, whom he married in 1854.
In any case, the pieces that were directly inspired by an event in his life are the exception. More often Berlioz’s stormy emotional life emerged indirectly, lending heat and colour to an imaginary scene drawn from one of his favourite authors. The Shakespearean strain appears in Berlioz’s masterpiece Romeo and Juliet and his third opera Béatrice
and Benedict. The figure of Goethe’s Faust, who inspired The Damnation
of Faust, seems to have had a special significance, probably because, like Berlioz himself, Faust was perpetually dissatisfied and lost in a world that couldn’t satisfy his desperate longings.
Above all Berlioz adored Virgil, whose mighty epic poetry was instilled in him as a child by his father who, as it happens, was Europe’s first practising acupuncturist. When Berlioz was inspired by something in real life, it was because he could infuse it with the characters and sublime feelings of these authors.
Yet this mingling of imagination and reality led Berlioz to make disastrous mistakes. His passion for Harriet Smithson was as much to do with the
thunderbolt of hearing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for the first time as it was to do with the Irish actress herself. In Mémoires, he says that at that moment he made two decisions: “I shall marry that woman and write my greatest symphony on the play.” Both predictions came true, but the first had an unhappy outcome. He could hardly get to know Smithson in any depth as she spoke no French and he had hardly any English, so unsurprisingly their marriage was a failure.
The gap between imagination and reality was something that constantly tormented Berlioz, but he had a winning streak of self-mockery, which saved him from self pity. When he discovered Camille Moke’s betrayal, his first instinct was to kill her and the new husband and the mother, in a spectacular triple murder. “As for subsequently killing myself, after a coup on this scale it was of course the very least I could do,” he remarked drily in Mémoires.
He packed a gun and a female outfit for the journey from Rome to Paris, as he thought a disguise would help him carry out the deed. Fortunately, common sense prevailed and Berlioz gave up the idea.
Some of the episodes in Mémoires are, however, downright lies. At one point, Berlioz tells us how his medical studies (which he undertook to please his father) came to an end. Berlioz said he soon strode out of the dissecting room in disgust, but in fact he took and passed the first-year exams. Many of the stories are to do with his endless struggles against the French musical establishment, which was disconcerted by his wild demeanour and even wilder music. On one occasion, an arch-enemy of Berlioz, a now long-forgotten conductor called Habeneck, was conducting the premier of one of Berlioz’s most colossal works, the Grand Messe des Morts. At a crucial moment, Berlioz says, “Habeneck laid down his baton and, calmly producing his snuff box, proceeded to take a pinch.” Berlioz was expecting such an act of sabotage that he leapt up to conduct himself.
Berlioz’s tendency to spin his music out of his own life, and to see himself as a valiant solitary fighter against Parisian musical philistinism, might lead us to expect that his music would be unhealthily self-obsessed. In fact it has none of the somewhat neurotic self-absorption of other Romantic composers such as Gustav Mahler. The refreshing thing about Berlioz is that though his torments and obsessions may have been the germinating impulse for his music, they always disappear into a larger mythic theme.
His fondness for using huge musical forces, and his extraordinarily bold and unorthodox harmonic and melodic sense, produced pieces that were immense and grand, in a way that is without parallel. As Heinrich Heine, the great poet and observer of Parisian musical scene, wrote, Berlioz was like “a colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle, such as existed, we are told, in primitive times”.