1803–1869 · France · Romantic
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was a French composer, conductor and writer on music of the Romantic era, the creator of the first Romantic programme symphony. He never learned to play the piano, but he played the guitar and the flute. The site offers three of his works for voice and piano.
Hector Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803 in the small town of La Côte-Saint-André in south-eastern France, not far from Grenoble. His father, Louis-Joseph Berlioz, was a respected provincial doctor who for the most part took charge of his son's education. Hector was the eldest of six children, three of whom did not live to adulthood. He stayed on good terms with his two sisters, Nancy and Adèle.
His childhood passed in the provinces, where he heard folk songs and became familiar with ancient myths. He was not a child prodigy: he began on music at twelve, and it was then that he started writing small pieces and arrangements. His father forbade him to learn the piano, and Berlioz never mastered the instrument, but he became a good player of the guitar, the flageolet and the flute. He studied harmony on his own from textbooks, without a teacher. Most of his early works were songs and chamber pieces.
In March 1821 Berlioz finished school in Grenoble, and in October he went to Paris to study medicine. His parents wanted this for him, but he himself was drawn to music. Medicine did not interest him, and after witnessing a dissection he came to loathe it.
On his first visit to the Paris Opéra he heard Christoph Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride; he admired Gluck as much as he admired Ludwig van Beethoven. He began visiting the library of the Paris Conservatoire, looking for scores of Gluck's operas to copy. In his memoirs Berlioz wrote that it was there that he first met Luigi Cherubini, the future director of the Conservatoire, who did not want to let in someone who was not a student. Berlioz also attended two operas by Gaspare Spontini, whose work influenced him. Soon he decided to become a composer, and a Conservatoire professor, Jean-François Le Sueur, helped him in this.
In 1823 he wrote his first article, a letter to the journal Le Corsaire in defence of Spontini's opera La Vestale. In 1824, despite his parents' disapproval, he formally gave up medicine to pursue a career as a composer. In 1825 his Messe solennelle was performed in public in Paris for the first time, without success. He then began the opera Les Francs-juges, of which only fragments survive.
Berlioz took lessons from Le Sueur for several years, and when he entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1826 he joined Le Sueur's counterpoint class; he also studied in the class of Anton Reicha. He also earned money as a chorus singer. At the end of 1827 he went to the Odéon theatre and saw the Irish actress Harriet Smithson as Ophelia and Juliet in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and he was captivated by her. He wrote her many love letters, but they embarrassed and frightened her, and so they went unanswered.
From 1828 Berlioz wrote critical articles about music and got to know the writers and musicians then in fashion, among them Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Niccolò Paganini and George Sand. In 1828–1830 several of his works were performed again: the overture Waverley, the overture to the opera Les Francs-juges, and the Symphonie fantastique. After the latter the public took notice of the young composer.
In 1830 Berlioz graduated from the Conservatoire and won the Prix de Rome for his academic cantata Sardanapale. For three years running he had tried for the prize, and each time the jury had turned him down. The same year a revolution began; Berlioz sympathised with the revolutionaries and even orchestrated the Marseillaise. Under the terms of the prize he travelled to Italy, to the Villa Medici. While in Rome he learned that his fiancée, the young pianist Marie Moke, had broken off the engagement and on 5 April 1831 had married the musician and publisher Camille Pleyel. To keep his stipend, Berlioz returned to Rome, where he took an interest in Italian music, met Mikhail Glinka and became acquainted with the works of Byron.
In 1833 Berlioz returned to France. He brought with him new works: the overture King Lear, written in Nice, and Lélio, or the Return to Life, a continuation of the Symphonie fantastique in a genre he called a 'melologue' (a mixture of instrumental and vocal music with declamation). Back home he worked energetically as a conductor, composer and critic, but met with complete rejection of his innovations from the official circles of France.
In Paris a relationship began between Berlioz and Harriet Smithson, and they married on 2 October 1833. The following year their first child, Louis-Thomas (1834–1867), was born. Before long conflicts began between the couple, and the marriage ended in divorce.
In 1833 Niccolò Paganini asked Berlioz to write a concerto for viola and orchestra in which Paganini himself intended to appear as the soloist. This is how the symphony Harold in Italy, with a solo viola, came about.
On 16 December 1838, after a concert at which Berlioz conducted the Symphonie fantastique and Harold, Paganini, a world-famous figure, threw himself on his knees before him and kissed his hands in tears of delight. The next day Berlioz received a letter from Paganini calling him Beethoven's successor, together with a cheque for twenty thousand francs.
Having settled in Paris, Berlioz kept several careers going at once: he composed programme symphonies and operas, conducted (among other places at the Paris Conservatoire) and wrote about music for the newspapers. His articles and feuilletons appeared almost daily for more than forty years, from 1823 to 1864, in the Paris papers Le Corsaire, Le Correspondant, La Gazette musicale de Paris and the Journal des Débats. He gained a reputation as a strict and serious critic.
Criticism brought in a decent income, but Berlioz hated it, because it left him little free time to compose. And although he was an authoritative critic, he never promoted his own works in his articles.
Among his literary works are Les Soirées de l’orchestre (1853), Les grotesques de la musique (1859) and A travers chant (1862). Particularly well known is the short story Euphonia, in which the author pictures a utopian society of the future where a musician's standing depends only on genuine achievement, not on social circumstances.
In 1839 Berlioz was appointed deputy librarian of the Paris Conservatoire. To support himself and his family he worked as a music critic. In 1850 he became the chief librarian of the Conservatoire.
From 1842 Berlioz toured widely abroad. As a conductor and composer he appeared with triumph in Russia, in 1847 and in 1867–1868; in particular, a sizeable audience gathered for a concert in the Moscow Manege. In 1847, while in Russia, he dedicated his earlier Symphonie fantastique to Emperor Nicholas I. His concerts in St Petersburg and Moscow were greeted with ovations, and the financial results of the trip exceeded expectations.
During the trip of 1867–1868 the composer lived in St Petersburg in the Mikhailovsky Palace, at 4 Inzhenernaya Street.
In 1856 Berlioz became a member of a French academic institution. In the 1860s he brought out collections of his articles. His Memoirs appeared in 1870, after his death.
Berlioz's personal life was clouded by a series of sad events, which he described in detail in his Memoirs. Harriet Smithson suffered for many years from an incurable nervous illness. After her death Berlioz married the singer Marie Recio, who died suddenly in 1862. His son from his first marriage died in Havana in 1867. Berlioz himself died alone in Paris on 8 March 1869, and a modest funeral took place on 11 March.
Berlioz was a leading representative of Romanticism in music and the creator of the Romantic programme symphony. He boldly introduced innovations in musical form, harmony and above all orchestration, and he was drawn to the theatricalisation of symphonic music and to works on a grand scale.
His style was already settled in the Symphonie fantastique (1830), which carries the subtitle 'An Episode in the Life of an Artist'. It is the first Romantic programme symphony. It reflects the moods typical of the time: a rift with reality, exaggerated emotion and sensitivity.
After it he wrote Lélio, or the Return to Life, a continuation of the Symphonie fantastique. He was drawn to subjects from Byron (the symphony for viola and orchestra Harold in Italy, 1834; the overture Le Corsaire, 1844), Shakespeare (the overture King Lear; the comic opera Béatrice et Bénédict, 1862; the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette, 1839) and Goethe (La damnation de Faust, 1846). He also wrote the opera Benvenuto Cellini (staged in 1838), six cantatas, orchestral overtures including the Roman Carnival (1844), and songs. The Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840) reflects a revolutionary theme.
For the funeral of General Damrémont, killed in Algeria in 1837, he composed his Requiem. In 1830, on the streets of Paris, he rehearsed revolutionary songs with the people. He wrote the libretti for his last two operas, for La damnation de Faust, for L'enfance du Christ and for other works himself. In his last years he was drawn more and more to academicism and moral subjects; this period produced the oratorio trilogy L'enfance du Christ and the opera diptych Les Troyens, after Virgil (1855–1859).
Berlioz's importance lies in his deep understanding of the instruments and his masterly use of them in orchestration. In the Symphonie fantastique he was one of the first to use the col legno technique in the strings. His treatise on instrumentation has been translated into many languages. Berlioz was also well known as a conductor: together with Wagner he laid the foundations of a new school of conducting. On a visit to Germany he found himself valued there more highly than in his own country.
The site currently has three editions of Berlioz, all for voice and piano: Absence (intermediate+), Villanelle (advanced) and Le spectre de la rose (advanced). As his biography shows, he himself never studied the piano.