Musical romantic
 Next week sees the bicentenary of the birth of the composer Hector Berlioz. “I
was born,” he wrote, “on 11 December 1803 in La Côte Saint-André,
a very small French town in the department of Isère between Vienne, Grenoble
and Lyons.”
Hector’s father, Louis Berlioz, was a local doctor, hard-working and greatly
respected, who sent him to a secondary school with the object of learning Latin,
but soon withdrew him to be educated at home, teaching him languages, literature,
history, geography and music. Hector spent his holidays with his mother and sisters
at Meylan, close to Dauphiné and the Basses Alpes. Nearby was the villa
of Madame Gautier, who had two nieces. With the younger of these, Estelle, Hector
fell madly in love. He retained this affection to the end of his chequered life.
Meanwhile Hector discovered a flageolet on which he performed airs. His father
introduced him to musical notation and presented him with a flute. He also learned
to play the guitar, but his father sternly forbade him the piano, fearing that
it might engross him too firmly in his music. Louis intended his son for the
medical profession. Hector was not keen on this. ‘ Without being sure what
I felt,” he noted in his memoirs, “I had a strong presentiment that
my life was not going to be spent at the bedsides of the sick, in hospitals and
dissecting rooms.”
Nevertheless, with his cousin Alphonse Robert, who later became a famous Paris
doctor, Hector arrived in the capital in 1822 to start anatomy studies at the
Hospice de la Pitié. Here he was appalled by the fragments of bodies,
the blood and tissues underfoot, the swarms of sparrows fighting over scraps
of lung, and the rats gnawing vertebrae in the corners. However, he resigned
himself to anatomy, and found consolation in the lectures given at the Jardin
des Plantes by Thénard in chemistry and Gay-Lussac in physics. But once
he had discovered the delights of the musical scores he found in the library
of the Conservatoire he deserted the dissecting-room for good to become (in the
description of the ‘Oxford companion to music’) “the greatest
musical figure in the French Romantic movement”.
In his impact on society, Berlioz was a problem to many of his contemporaries.
His inamoratas ranged from Estelle of his boyhood to Harriet Smithson, the Irish
actress, whom he married in Paris in 1833, and who died in 1854. His second wife
was Marie Recio, who died in 1862. In his youth he had a dramatic experience
with Marie Moke, a distinguished pianist with whom he became infatuated. He was
in Italy in 1831, and while in Florence learned that Marie had married Camille,
the pianist son of the famous Parisian piano-maker Ignace Pleyel. “Two
tears of rage started from my eyes. In that instant I knew my course; it was
to go at once to Paris and there kill without compunction two guilty women and
one guilty man.” Hector ordered a lady’s-maid outfit to be made for
him, and purchased pistols. He planned to make his way in disguise into the Pleyel
home and kill those he thought guilty. Fortunately, travel difficulties defeated
him and, in due course, he married Harriet.
With concert hall and theatre officials Hector also had many tussles. He had
a passion for enormous orchestras, and for choirs of several hundred. One orchestral
arrangement of his called for 240 strings, 30 grand pianos, 30 harps plus wind
and percussion to match. He is best known for his Symphonie Fantastique, Harold
en Italie, and Damnation de Faust, but he was responsible for more than 40 major
works, as well as books on instrumentation and the art of conducting. Berlioz
died on 8 March 1869 in Paris.
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