He was accused at the time by the musicologist Winton Dean of being excessively partisan, and refusing to admit failings and unevenness in Berlioz's music;[182] more recently he has been credited by the critic Nicholas Temperley with playing a major part in improving the climate of musical opinion towards Berlioz. His marriage to Smithson had not lasted, and his second wife had passed away in 1862. Even among those unsympathetic to his music, few deny that Berlioz was a master of orchestration. Singers who have recorded Les Nuits d'été include Victoria de los Ángeles, Leontyne Price, Janet Baker, Régine Crespin, Jessye Norman and Kiri Te Kanawa,[202] and more recently, Karen Cargill and Susan Graham. Protracted applause followed the performance, and the press reviews expressed both the shock and the pleasure the work had given. [6] He and his son had grown deeply attached to each other, but Louis was a captain in the merchant navy, and was more often than not away from home. He heard Beethoven's third, fifth and seventh symphonies performed at the Conservatoire,[n 8] and read Goethe's Faust in Gérard de Nerval's translation. Rushton observes that Berlioz's preference for irregular rhythm subverts conventional harmony: "Classic and romantic melody usually implies harmonic motion of some consistency and smoothness; Berlioz's aspiration to musical prose tends to resist such consistency. Quotes"Time is a great teacher, […] [47], Berlioz took little pleasure in his time in Rome. The Misunderstood Music Of Hector Berlioz (And Why It Matters) : Deceptive Cadence To mark the sesquicentennial of the composer's death — and a new box set of recordings — Berlioz … [13], Music did not feature prominently in the young Berlioz's education. He struggled to make money from his concerts in Paris, and learning of the large sums made by promoters from performances of his music in other countries, he resolved to try conducting abroad. He took music lessons at home from a visiting teacher and played flute and guitar. [69][n 13] A few days later Berlioz was astonished to receive a cheque from him for 20,000 francs. [128] Berlioz took instruments hitherto used for special purposes and introduced them into his regular orchestra: Macdonald mentions the harp, the cor anglais, the bass clarinet and the valve trumpet. [99] Having first completed the orchestration of his 1841 song cycle Les Nuits d'été,[100] he began work on Les Troyens – The Trojans – writing his own libretto based on Virgil's epic. Hector Berlioz, as he was known, was entranced with music as a child. "[125] The pianist and musical analyst Charles Rosen has written that Berlioz often sets the climax of his melodies in relief with the most emphatic chord a triad in root position, and often a tonic chord where the melody leads the listener to expect a dominant. [39] The first few years of the marriage were happy, although it eventually foundered. On the 150th anniversary of Hector Berlioz’s death Hector Berlioz (Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Pierre Petit) A member of the educated classes, a librarian, music critic, composer, eccentric, genius – Hector Berlioz combined many gifts and facets. Of Berlioz's brass he writes: Brass can be solemn or brazen; the "Marche au supplice" in the Symphonie fantastique is a defiantly modern use of brass. His works contributed to the burgeoning romanticism and influenced orchestral techniques for more than a century. He wrote the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette for voices, chorus and orchestra. Gender: Male Religion: Atheist Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Composer. Two years later, he left medicine behind to become a composer. [55], Paganini, known chiefly as a violinist, had acquired a Stradivarius viola, which he wanted to play in public if he could find the right music. Macdonald comments that there are few facets of musical practice of the time untouched in Berlioz's feuilletons. [6], Berlioz's approach to harmony and counterpoint was idiosyncratic, and has provoked adverse criticism. His parents had five more children, three of whom died in infancy;[7] their surviving daughters, Nanci and Adèle, remained close to Berlioz throughout their lives. [192], Cairns dismisses the article as "an astonishing anthology of all the nonsense that has ever been talked about [Berlioz]", but adds that by the 1960s it seemed a quaint survival from a vanished age. Weingartner called it "a style-less mixture of different forms; not quite oratorio, not quite opera, not quite symphony – fragments of all three, and nothing perfect". Music did not at that time enjoy the prestige of literature in French culture,[6] but Paris nonetheless possessed two major opera houses and the country's most important music library. He went his own way, carving out each successive score with a bracing spontaneity and freedom that left most of his contemporaries in the shade. In 1826, Berlioz enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire. The initials "G.I." [60] His journalism consisted mainly of music criticism, some of which he collected and published, such as Evenings in the Orchestra (1854), but also more technical articles, such as those that formed the basis of his Treatise on Instrumentation (1844). [32] In later works he reused parts of the score, such as the "March of the Guards", which he incorporated four years later in the Symphonie fantastique as the "March to the Scaffold". [102], In June 1862 Berlioz's wife died suddenly, aged 48. [171] The first version, written at the Villa Medici, had been in fairly regular rhythm, but for his revision Berlioz made the strophic outline less clear-cut, and added optional orchestral parts for the last stanza, which brings the song to a quiet close. Perhaps it was simple admiration for the poems of his friend and fellow critic Théophile Gautier that inspired Berlioz to such heights. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. When the production of another choral work, La Damnation de Faust, became a financial sinkhole after its premiere in 1846, touring again came to the rescue. [79] In November 1841 he began publishing a series of sixteen articles in the Revue et gazette musicale giving his views about orchestration; they were the basis of his Treatise on Instrumentation, published in 1843. Opera Singer. However, much of his time was spent at the Paris-Opéra, where he absorbed Christoph Willibald Gluck's operas. His colleagues at the Villa Medici, under their benevolent principal Horace Vernet, made him welcome,[49] and he enjoyed his meetings with Felix Mendelssohn, who was visiting the city,[n 10] but he found Rome distasteful: "the most stupid and prosaic city I know; it is no place for anyone with head or heart. It was performed twice, after which he suppressed the score, which was thought lost until a copy was discovered in 1991. In the 1840s, touring throughout Europe began to offer Berlioz another source of income; he was particularly appreciated as a conductor in Germany, Russia and England. "[173], Berlioz's literary output was considerable and mostly consists of music criticism. [186][187] He is also one of the editors of Berlioz's Correspondance générale, and author of a 1978 study of Berlioz's orchestral music, and of the Grove article on the composer. [175], Other selections from Berlioz's press columns were published in Les Soirées de l'orchestre (Evenings with the Orchestra, 1852), Les Grotesques de la musique (1859) and À travers chants (Through Songs, 1862). [67][68], Shortly after the failure of the opera, Berlioz had a great success as composer-conductor of a concert at which Harold in Italy was given again. He had not been diagnosed for psychiatric problems until age 36 and he died at age 43 from paresis after several hospitalizations and an attempt to drown himself. Some of them, such as "Hélène" and "Sara la baigneuse", exist in versions for four voices with accompaniment, and there are others for two or three voices. His parents had five more children, three of whom died in infancy; their surviving daughters, Nanci and Adèle, remained close to Berlioz throughout their lives. Hector Berlioz wrote the Symphonie fantastique at the age of 27. He put together a collection of earlier pieces in a form then fashionable, the monodrama, or recitation by one actor interspersed with musical scenes. On the 29th I had finished, and was free to go out and roam about Paris till morning, pistol in hand. [71][n 14] Paganini's gift enabled Berlioz to pay off Harriet's and his own debts, give up music criticism for the time being, and concentrate on composition. [6] Despite his complaints, Berlioz continued writing music criticism for most of his life, long after he had any financial need to do so. Towards the end of the year he and Harriet separated. Finding aid to Hector Berlioz papers at Columbia University. [185] Macdonald was appointed in 1967 as the inaugural general editor of the New Berlioz Edition published by Bärenreiter; 26 volumes were issued between 1967 and 2006 under his editorship. [117], Rushton suggests that "Berlioz's way is neither architectural nor developmental, but illustrative". The article is evidently based to an important extent on a reading of Berlioz’s own Memoirs; it is mainly biographical in approach and makes no attempt to assess the influence of Shakespeare on Berlioz’s work. It was not a story like Beethoven’s Fifth, where we intuitively understand broad ideas of struggle and triumph. [186] Rushton has published two volumes of analyses of Berlioz's music (1983 and 2001). [39] His earnings from composing were neither substantial nor regular, and he supplemented them by writing music criticism for the Parisian press. [129], All four of Berlioz's symphonies differ from the contemporary norm. [193] As more and more Berlioz works became widely available on record, professional musicians and critics, and the musical public, were for the first time able to judge for themselves. He had lost his only child, Louis, in 1867. [61][n 12], Berlioz secured a commission from the French government for his Requiem – the Grande messe des morts – first performed at Les Invalides in December 1837. [91] He returned to London in 1852 and 1853, conducting his own works and others'. 1. His feelings were reciprocated, and the couple planned to be married. [140] Among Berlioz's admirers the work divides opinion. [14], In March 1821 Berlioz passed the baccalauréat examination at the University of Grenoble – it is not certain whether at the first or second attempt[18] – and in late September, aged seventeen, he moved to Paris. [159] The action focuses on the sparring between the two leading characters, but the score contains some gentler music, such as the nocturne-duet "Nuit paisible et sereine", the beauty of which, Cairns suggests, matches or surpasses the love music in Roméo or Les Troyens. [98] He spent much of the next year in conducting and writing prose. The rest of his education he had from his father. [121][122] His approach to rhythm caused perplexity to conservatively-inclined contemporaries; he hated the phrase carrée – the unvaried four- or eight-bar phrase – and introduced new varieties of rhythm to his music. [201], In addition to Davis's versions, Les Troyens has received studio recordings under Charles Dutoit and John Nelson; Nelson and Daniel Barenboim have recorded versions of Béatrice et Bénédict, and Nelson and Roger Norrington have conducted Benvenuto Cellini for CD. [95] Both Berlioz and their son Louis had been with her shortly before her death. His mother, Marie-Antoinette, was a devout Roman Catholic. His best-known work in the genre is the song cycle Les Nuits d'été, a group of six songs, originally for voice and piano but now usually heard in its later orchestrated form. [38], The cantata was La Mort de Sardanapale, with which he won the Prix de Rome. Hector Berlioz Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts), for tenor solo, chorus and orchestra ... Death and Nature shall be astonished When all creation rises again To answer to the Judge. He wrote Les Troyens, inspired by Virgil's Aeneid, at this time, but only got to see a few of the opera's acts be performed in 1863. Hector Berlioz was born on December 11, 1803 and died on March 8, 1869. He also returned to William Shakespeare once more, creating the opera Béatrice et Bénédict (based on Much Ado About Nothing), which had a successful debut in Germany in 1862. Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803,[n 2] the eldest child of Louis Berlioz (1776–1848), a physician, and his wife, Marie-Antoinette Joséphine, née Marmion (1784–1838). A second government commission followed – the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale in 1840. He wrote a Te Deum, completed in 1849 but not published until 1855, and some short pieces. The second, the huge epic Les Troyens (The Trojans), was so large in scale that it was never staged in its entirety during his lifetime. [14], At the age of twelve Berlioz fell in love for the first time. He was particularly inspired by Gluck's use of the orchestra to carry the drama along. His reception in London was enthusiastic, but the visit was not a financial success because of mismanagement by his impresario, the conductor Louis-Antoine Jullien. 120–125; Schwann, p. 77; and Clough and Cuming (1952), p. 64; (1953), p. 32; and (1957), pp. [118], Berlioz's compositional techniques have been strongly criticised and equally strongly defended. The Conservatoire concerts were conducted by. [6] A cantata for double chorus and large orchestra in honour of Napoleon III, L'Impériale, described by Berlioz as "en style énorme", was played several times at the 1855 exhibition, but has subsequently remained a rarity. Her mother remained devoted to Berlioz and nursed him through his final illness in 1869. [90] In 1851 he was at the Great Exhibition in London as a member of an international committee judging musical instruments. Maurice Ravel was a 19th and early 20th century French composer of classical music. He based the program on his own impassioned life and transferred his memoirs into his best- known program symphony. He never studied the piano, and throughout his life played haltingly at best. The only way he could find of seeing the work produced was to divide it into two parts: "The Fall of Troy" and "The Trojans at Carthage". Nationality: France [78] He also worked on a projected opera, La Nonne sanglante (The Bloody Nun), to a libretto by Eugène Scribe, but made little progress. In her last years Recio suffered from heart disease, the cause of her death at 48. However, an opera, Benvenuto Cellini (1838), flopped. Letter of 17 July 1887, quoted in Rushton (1983), p. 28. Hector Berlioz: “Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. Considered Poland's greatest composer, Frédéric Chopin focused his efforts on piano composition and was a strong influence on composers who followed him. [101] In the same year he completed Les Troyens. Kennedy, Michael, and Joyce Bourne Kennedy. Within days of arriving in Paris he went to the Opéra, and although the piece on offer was by a minor composer, the staging and the magnificent orchestral playing enchanted him. [55] The couple lived first in Paris, and later in Montmartre (then still a village). During 1825 and 1826 he wrote his first opera, Les Francs-juges, which was not performed and survives only in fragments, the best known of which is the overture. [150], The epic Les Troyens (1858) is described by the musical scholar James Haar as "incontestably Berlioz's masterpiece",[151] a view shared by many other writers. "Davis and the LSO embark on their year-long journey through Berlioz", Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor, pp. In 1802 he had married Marie-Antoinette-Joséphine Marmion, a good-looking woman, religious to the point of bigotry. [178][n 25] Like Strong, Turner was, in the words of the music critic Charles Reid, "unhampered by any excess of technical knowledge". His father, Louis-Joseph, was a respected physician. The Hector Berlioz Website was created by Monir Tayeb and Michel Austin on 18 July 1997; this page created on 8 March 2007, revised on 9 January 2021. Neither work brought him much money or artistic fame at the time,[6] but the Requiem held a special place in his affections: "If I were threatened with the destruction of the whole of my works save one, I would crave mercy for the Messe des morts". He presented it in Paris in December 1846, but it played to half-empty houses, despite excellent reviews, some from critics not usually well disposed to his music. The BBC commemorated the centenary of Berlioz’s death with a series of programmes on radio and television over a two week period. [6] In August 1868, he felt able to travel briefly to Grenoble to judge a choral festival. As well as losing both his wives, he had lost both his sisters,[n 16] and he became morbidly aware of death as many of his friends and other contemporaries died. [93] In the early years of the decade Berlioz made numerous appearances in Germany as a conductor. [145][n 22] Wagner called the symphony "popular in the most ideal sense ... every urchin in a blue blouse would thoroughly understand it". [108] After they ceased to meet, Amélie died, aged only 26. The family lived in the country, north west of Grenoble. [47] Through a third party, Berlioz had sent an invitation to Harriet Smithson, who accepted, and was dazzled by the celebrities in the audience. Macdonald comments that after his time there, Berlioz had "a new colour and glow in his music ... sensuous and vivacious" – derived not from Italian painting, in which he was uninterested, or Italian music, which he despised, but from "the scenery and the sun, and from his acute sense of locale". He then spent five years trying to have it staged. ", Strauss's phrase "inventor of the modern orchestra" was used by the. Allison, John. Abstraction and discursiveness are alien to this tradition, and in operas, and to a large extent in orchestral music, there is little continuous development; instead self-contained numbers or sections are preferred. His father was a doctor. Cairns writes that unlike Meyerbeer, who was rich, influential, and deferred to by opera managements, Berlioz was "an opera composer on sufferance, one who composed on borrowed time paid for with money that was not his but lent by a wealthy friend". [165], La Damnation de Faust, though conceived as a work for the concert hall, did not achieve success in France until it was staged as an opera long after the composer's death. [88] When in Paris he visited her continually, sometimes twice a day. This is a comparatively recent development. [106] Berlioz's physical health was not good, and he was often in pain from an intestinal complaint, possibly Crohn's disease. He enjoyed consistent success there, with the exception of a revival of Benvenuto Cellini at Covent Garden which was withdrawn after one performance. An extensive German tour followed: in 1842 and 1843 he gave concerts in twelve German cities. [167], L'Enfance du Christ (1850–1854) follows the pattern of La Damnation de Faust in mixing dramatic action and philosophic reflection. It accepts life as it is. Jacques Cousteau was a French undersea explorer, researcher, photographer and documentary host who invented diving and scuba devices, including the Aqua-Lung. Embracing nontraditional scales and tonal structures, Claude Debussy is one of the most highly regarded composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is seen as the founder of musical impressionism. In the mid-1950s the international record catalogues listed complete recordings of seven major works: the Symphonie fantastique, Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, Harold in Italy, Les Nuits d'été, Roméo et Juliette, the Requiem and the Te Deum, and various overtures. [109] He called on her in September 1864; she received him kindly, and he visited her in three successive summers; he wrote to her nearly every month for the rest of his life. She presented a ruinously unsuccessful season, first at the Théâtre-Italien and then at lesser venues, and by March 1833 she was deep in debt. [15] He poured some of his unrequited feelings into his early attempts at composition. His most substantial work between The Damnation and his epic Les Troyens (1856–1858) was a "sacred trilogy", L'Enfance du Christ (Christ's Childhood), which he began in 1850. His Treatise on Instrumentation (1834) began as a series of articles and remained a standard work on orchestration throughout the 19th century; when Richard Strauss was commissioned to revise it in 1905 he added new material but did not change Berlioz's original text. [203], By far the most recorded of Berlioz's works is the Symphonie fantastique. Trombones introduce Mephistopheles with three flashing chords or support the gloomy doubts of Narbal in Les Troyens. [176] Of those who wrote for and against Berlioz's music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, among the most outspoken were musical amateurs such as the lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong, who called the composer's music variously "flatulent", "rubbish", and "the work of a tipsy chimpanzee",[177] and, in the pro-Berlioz camp, the poet and journalist Walter J. Turner, who wrote what Cairns calls "exaggerated eulogies". He liked French and Latin literature and travel books about faraway countries. That same year he was appointed as a deputy librarian at the Paris Conservatory. His father, Louis Berlioz, a physician, is believed to have introduced acupunctural techniques in Europe. 66–67, List of compositions and writings by Hector Berlioz, Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Smithson (married name Berlioz), Harriet Constance (1800–1854), actress", "Symphony guide: Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique", "Prom 47: Music-making of the highest order", "Damnation de Faust, La ('The Damnation of Faust')", "A listener's guide to Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust". "use strict";(function(){var insertion=document.getElementById("citation-access-date");var date=new Date().toLocaleDateString(undefined,{month:"long",day:"numeric",year:"numeric"});insertion.parentElement.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(date),insertion)})(); Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Cairns uses "Josephine" as Mme Berlioz's usual name, as does Diana Bickley in the. Painter and sculptor Edgar Degas was a highly celebrated 19th-century French Impressionist whose work helped shape the fine art landscape for years to come. He left Rome in May 1832 and arrived in Paris in November. Although at the time Berlioz spoke hardly any English, he was overwhelmed by the plays – the start of a lifelong passion for Shakespeare. The following year, to earn some money, he joined the chorus at the Théâtre des Nouveautés. The latter, consisting of the final three acts of the original, was presented at the Théâtre‐Lyrique, Paris, in November 1863, but even that truncated version was further truncated: during the run of 22 performances, number after number was cut. [147], The three operas contrast strongly with one another. [113] He was buried in Montmartre Cemetery with his two wives, who were exhumed and re-buried next to him. [19] He had to fight hard to overcome his revulsion at dissecting bodies, but in deference to his father's wishes, he forced himself to continue his medical studies. Almost nothing is known of their relationship, which lasted for less than a year. The object of his affections was an eighteen-year-old neighbour, Estelle Dubœuf. [44] Berlioz made an elaborate plan to kill them both (and her mother, known to him as "l'hippopotame"),[45] and acquired poisons, pistols and a disguise for the purpose. [n 21] Cairns regards the work as symphonic, albeit "a bold extension" of the genre, but he notes that other Berliozians including Wilfrid Mellers view it as "a curious, not entirely convincing compromise between symphonic and operatic techniques". Hector Berlioz. Berlioz found his financial footing in the 1850s, when his L'Enfance du Christ (1854) was a success and he was elected to the Institut de France, thus enabling him to receive a stipend. Berlioz left behind many innovative compositions that had set the tone for the Romantic period; though the originality of his work may have worked against him during his lifetime, appreciation of his music would continue to grow after his death. Heeding Vernet's advice that it would be prudent to delay his return to Paris, where the Conservatoire authorities might be less indulgent about his premature ending of his studies, he made a leisurely journey back, detouring via La Côte-Saint-André to see his family. After the 1830s, Berlioz found it increasingly difficult to achieve recognition for his music in France. Some was collected and published in book form. Feelings about the merits of his music are seldom lukewarm; it has always tended to excite either uncritical admiration or unfair disparagement. Louis-Hector Berlioz[n 1] (11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869) was a French Romantic composer and conductor. Berlioz was often forced to rely on music criticism and other writing jobs to make ends meet, though a large financial gift from violinist Niccolò Paganini helped him write the choral symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839). He was not a child prodigy, though displayed talent when he started studying music at age 12. [39], By now recoiling from his obsession with Smithson, Berlioz fell in love with a nineteen-year-old pianist, Marie ("Camille") Moke. Barzun suggests that his father might have been more sympathetic but for his mother's zealous religious conviction that all players and artists were doomed to damnation. After arriving back in Paris Hector Berlioz gradually grew weaker and died at his house in the Rue de Calais on 8 March 1869, at the age of 65. Between 1842 and 1863 he traveled to Germany, England, Austria, Russia and elsewhere,[10][13] where he conducted operas and orchestral music - bot… He described it as "a caprice written with the point of a needle". Following more European tours, a lonely Berlioz returned to Paris in 1868. Berlioz completed three operas, the first of which, Benvenuto Cellini, was an outright failure. Born: 11-Dec-1803 Birthplace: La Côte-St-André, Isère, France Died: 8-Mar-1869 Location of death: Paris, France Cause of death: unspecified Remains: Buried, Cimetière de Montmartre, Paris, France. He learned to play the flute and guitar, and became a self-taught composer. [85] The failure of the piece left Berlioz heavily in debt; he restored his finances the following year with the first of two highly remunerative trips to Russia. Berlioz's liking for Mendelssohn's music was not reciprocated: the latter made no secret of his opinion that Berlioz lacked talent. [29], In 1824 Berlioz graduated from medical school,[29] after which he abandoned medicine, to the strong disapproval of his parents. In 1999 the composer and critic Bayan Northcott wrote that the work of Cairns, Rushton, Sir Colin Davis and others retained "the embattled conviction of a cause". His excellence as a witty and perceptive critic may have worked to his disadvantage in another way: he became so well known to the French public in that capacity that his stature as a composer became correspondingly more difficult to establish. [114], In his 1983 book The Musical Language of Berlioz, Julian Rushton asks "where Berlioz comes in the history of musical forms and what is his progeny". [204], "Berlioz" redirects here. [76] The following year the Opéra commissioned Berlioz to adapt Weber's Der Freischütz to meet the house's rigid requirements: he wrote recitatives to replace the spoken dialogue and orchestrated Weber's Invitation to the Dance to provide the obligatory ballet music.
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