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Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869)
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Commonly referred to as an icon of the Romantic movement, which was a breaking-away from the preceding structured simplicity of neo-Classicism, the caricature of Berlioz the mad
artist and adulterer unjustly reduces a man who was dedicated and dutiful to (certain members of) his family, and unyieldingly passionate towards his art. Possibly a polymath, and definitely defiant, his exclusion from the musical trinity of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms belie a much deeper and intriguing character history.
Born in Isère in southeastern France, Berlioz’s fixation with older women began early, with an unrequited crush on his neighbour Estelle Dubœuf inspiring his early efforts at musical composition. The eldest son of a liberal agnostic doctor and a strict Roman Catholic mother, he was closest to his two sisters Nanci and Adèle throughout their lives. His brilliance and ambition as a Romantic individual was apparent in his studies and distractions, ranging from geography, Latin, philosophy, to medicine, and of course, music.
In the early 1820s, Berlioz had moved to Paris to study medicine at his father’s behest. Against the backdrop of war and Revolution stood the booming city of culture teeming with art, literature, and to a lesser extent, music - mostly appearing in the setting of opera. Berlioz was so smitten with Gluck’s music and orchestration that he resolved to become a composer. Meanwhile, his fiery attempts at defending French opera against its more popular Italian counterpart also fostered his burgeoning talent at writing criticism. By the time he had graduated from medical school, Berlioz had made significant headway composing and writing while studying privately from the Paris Conservatoire composition professor. Abandoning the logic and stability of a medical profession, and despite his father withholding his allowance and his mother’s belief that “all players and artists were doomed to damnation”, Berlioz careered headlong into music.
The years leading up to his first Symphonie Fantastique were prolific. While studying at the Paris Conservatoire, Berlioz fell head over heels in adoration for Shakespeare’s plays, and even more so with the leading lady Harriet Smithson in 1826. In his composition, Berlioz had written his first Messe Solemnelle and opera Les Francs-juges, works which the composer tried to destroy, but also paradoxically quarried major themes for his Symphonie. He sang in the choir, which made him money. His first concert however did not. Berlioz also attempted four times to win the Prix de Rome for the category of (vocal) composition, a most prestigious competition originally held for visual artists before its expansion to other artistic realms - he finally bagged the first grand prize in 1830 right before the premiere of his Symphonie Fantastique. While his romantic interest in Smithson was swinging wildly between deranged obsession and dismissal (they still had yet to meet until 1832!) Berlioz became engaged to yet another - a young pianist, in 1830. In true operatic fashion, she dumped him for a wealthy heir to the Pleyel piano empire. Residing in Rome under the obligation of the Prix when he found out, this mad drama continued with Berlioz hatching a plan to murder the new couple and her mother, going so far as to purchase a dress for disguise, pistols, and the obligatory poison. By some miracle or divine intervention, the composer stopped short of carrying out the grim plan in Paris. During this sober pause of redemption, he wrote his King Lear overture, and on his way back to Rome he began the sequel to the Symphonie Fantastique, the aptly named The Return to Life. After Berlioz and Smithson finally(!) met after a concert in late 1832 featuring the Symphonie Fantastique and The Return to Life, they married in 1833 and had a son a year later. Smithson, known for her beauty and flawless character, tragically faced a
declining career torn between an unsympathetic England and a France she could hardly communicate with, and by the 1840s she had lost her husband to his future second wife Marie Recio. After they separated in 1844, Smithson succumbed to alcoholism, and near-paralysed by a series of debilitating strokes, later died in 1854. Their whirlwind decade together bracketed Berlioz’s quartet of unique and irreverent symphonies - the psychedelic Symphonie Fantastique, the vivid Harold en Italie for viola and orchestra, the Shakespearean “dramatic symphony” Roméo et Juliette for voices and chorus and orchestra, and the magnificent Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale for military band.
Besides being a master orchestrator, Berlioz was also a master of words, and around the time of taking Marie Recio as his mistress, had completed the piano and voice version of Les Nuits d'été, as well as La Damnation de Faust, both relative failures in the concert hall during his lifetime. As fortune would have it, having had a hand at conducting and being good at it, his foreign tours saw much fame and financial growth. It was only after Harriet Smithson passed away did Berlioz formally marry Marie Recio, finish the orchestration of Les Nuits d'été, and complete his late landmark works including his gargantuan opera Les Troyens, and the most charming and well-received L'enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ).
In his final decade of life, Berlioz met tragedy after tragedy - the sudden death of Marie Recio, his two sisters, and his son. He remained dedicated to Recio’s mother, and poetically, in his final years, found his now-widowed first romance Estelle, to whom he wrote regularly till his very end. Berlioz was buried with his two wives in 1869.
Controversial even among his contemporaries and countrymen, contributed by his lack of conventional keyboard training, eschewing of classical forms and established concepts such as regular four-/eight-bar phrases and traditional harmonic progressions, Berlioz unwittingly became a visionary ahead of his time, paving the stylistic path for future greats including Mahler, and finding parallels in rule-breakers such as Messiaen. By the efforts of musical titans in the league of Mahler, Kajanus, Sir Colin Davis, Charles Munch, and Leonard Bernstein, we are blessed today to continue to witness the genius of the "first genuine romantic, maybe the only genuine romantic." “...Why separate them? They are two wings of the soul.”
Programme notes by Jonathan Francis Koh
