Hector Berlioz; A Romantic Tragedy — Part 1

“No doubt I deserve to go to Hell”, said Berlioz once to a friend who had reproached him for his treatment of Henrietta Smithson, his first wife; “but what would you have?

I am in Hell already!

” It was not an exaggeration or a figure of speech.

Berlioz was in hell the greater part of his life.

Of all the great composers he was perhaps the most consistently wretched.

Misery and frustration pursued him from his youth to his grave.

Time and again his existence seemed like the fulfillment of a curse.

Actually, his mother had called one down upon him at the very beginning of his career and for the rest of his days it appeared to work itself out implacably.

One might even believe the malediction had retained its power beyond the tomb.

For the posthumous glory of Berlioz is by no means unchallenged.

Almost alone among the masters he does not command anything like universal admiration, let alone affection.

He has his redoubtable champions and they include many of the greatest musicians, living and dead.

But where Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner need no defense Berlioz incontestably does.

Rightly or wrongly he continues to be a problem, with all that this condition implies.

Yet without him music could not conceivably be just what it is.

And perhaps the strangest aspect of the paradox is that only a limited portion of his output enjoys anything like what might be called frequent hearing.

The greater part of his greatest works remains to all intents, undiscovered—nay, unsuspected—by the multitude.

The little mountain town, La Côte-Saint-André, where Louis-Hector Berlioz was born on December 11, 1803, had briefly been called La Côte-Bonne-Eau during the Revolution and the Reign of Terror when “saints”, for a while, went out of fashion.

It was not far from Grenoble on one side or from Lyon on another.

The Berlioz family originated in Savoie and can be traced back to the sixteenth century.

Hector’s father, Louis Berlioz, a doctor and a property owner, had at one time been mayor of La Côte-Saint-André.

In 1802 he had married Marie-Antoinette-Joséphine Marmion, a good-looking woman, religious to the point of bigotry.

Hector was the oldest of six children, two of whom died at an early age.

The surviving daughters, Nanci and Adèle, were followed as late as 1820 by a son, Prosper, a “problem child” in the truest sense of the term, vague and unmanageable up to the time of a belated adolescence, then developing into a mathematical genius and dying in his twentieth year before people had ceased to marvel at his talents.

Hector’s father supervised his early education, though it was probably as a concession to his wife that he placed the youngster in the local Catholic Seminary.

The boy did not stay there long even if his mother harbored ambitions of making a saint of him.

For a time he went uncomplainingly to mass, communion, confession and the rest.

In his Memoirs Hector tells us details of his weekly “confessions” when he would say to the “director” of his conscience “My father, I have done nothing” and that worthy would reply “Go on, my child, as you have begun”.

And so he did—for several years, at least.

Yet his mother’s religiosity was to have the effect of turning Hector’s thoughts away from the church and toward the great figures of classical mythology.

He “felt his heart throb and his voice quiver and break” when he construed the fourth book of Virgil’s “Aeneid” to his father; and when the good man tactfully cut the lesson short Hector was “intensely grateful to him for taking no notice of my emotion and rushed away to vent my Virgilian grief in solitude”.

Mythology was not the only love with which his father filled him; under the paternal guidance he developed an interest in geography and stories of travel helped fire his imagination.

[Illustration: Birthplace—La Côte-Saint-André] From an early age Hector had shown a sensitiveness to musical impressions and, besides learning to sing at sight, acquired some proficiency in playing the flute and the flageolet—though “I was twelve before the magic of music was revealed to me”.

Presently he added to his musical accomplishments the playing of the guitar.

The piano he never, apparently, undertook to master.

But in later years he made a virtue of necessity and insisted he was glad to compose “silently and freely” without having to depend on the keyboard.

With harmony it was rather different and after an unsuccessful start with Rameau’s treatise on the subject, even in a simplified form, he had recourse to a text book by Catel in order to pick up some elementary principles.

These he presently put to use in a “six part potpourri on a collection of Italian airs” and in the composition of a couple of quintets for flute and strings.

The first was played by some local amateurs and aroused the enthusiasm of all the hearers except Hector’s father.

Dr. Berlioz preferred as much of the later quintet as his son was able to play him on the flute, but the piece being much more difficult, the amateur executants who tried it quickly suffered shipwreck.

The composer eventually burned both scores yet salvaged a theme his father had liked and then used it in his overture, “Les Francs-Juges.

” Simultaneously with these hit or miss musical studies the boy’s emotional life was heightened at about this time by an incipient love affair, if one can call it so.

Hector’s relatives, the Marmions, had a country house near Grenoble in the village of Meylan, where he spent his vacations.

Not far away, in a white cottage, surrounded by vineyards and gardens there lived with her mother and sister a tall and exceedingly pretty girl of eighteen, Estelle Duboeuf.

At a family garden party, to which Hector and his relations had been invited, Estelle picked him for her partner in some game.

Poor Hector was conquered in the twinkling of an eye.

When a few minutes later he caught sight of Estelle dancing with his uncle Marmion—who had been a soldier in Napoleon’s armies and cut a superb figure in his gaudy uniform and clanking spurs—the boy flew into a jealous rage, only to have the whole party laugh at him!

But Estelle—his “Stella montis”, his “Star of the Mountain”—remained enshrined in his memory for life.

Their ways were to separate and they lost track of each other for years.

A haggard old man, wracked and buffeted by numberless woes and disappointments, he found her again and sought solace (vainly, as it proved) in an attempt to recapture the shadow of a childhood fancy.

His reward was a polite note signed Estelle Fornier—her married name—and a conventional “affectionate greetings”, into which he chose to read meanings that the old lady never remotely intended!

* * * Hector’s parents determined he should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a physician.

The idea revolted him and he struggled against it much as Schumann combated his mother’s wish to make a jurist of a youth with the soul of a poet.

Nevertheless, he made as if to comply with the parental will—though one can guess with how many unspoken reservations!

And so in the autumn of 1821, he set off for Paris to study medicine.

But what fascinated him there were the theatres, the opera houses, the concert halls—things which up to that time he had never enjoyed the opportunity of visiting—and not the loathsome hospitals, anatomical amphitheatres, dissecting rooms and other nauseating horrors.

He had felt all along that he was never intended to spend his life “at the bedside of sick people, in hospitals and dissecting chambers”.

His father had made the cardinal mistake of “using his love of music as a lever for removing his ‘childish aversion’ to embark on the study of medicine” and, as a reward for working earnestly at osteology had given his refractory son nothing less to the purpose than “a splendid flute, with all the new keys”!

In Paris Hector lost no time visiting the Opéra, the Théâtre Italien, the Théâtre Feydeau, the Ambigu-Comique.

He heard Salieri’s “Danaides”, Boieldieu’s “Voitures Versées”, Dalayrac’s “Nina”.

Above all, he heard Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride”, and this masterpiece definitely settled the question.

His life would be dedicated to music and medicine could go hang!

Berlioz the scarlet Romanticist was born at the moment he solemnly made this resolve.

It was farewell, henceforth, to the “human charnel house, littered with fragments of limbs, ghastly faces and cloven heads where swarms of sparrows fought for scraps and rats in the corners gnawed human vertebrae.

” He had, to be sure, grown somewhat hardened after his first appalling impression and had even gotten so far as to “cast a shoulder blade to a great rat which was staring at me with famished eyes”!

But the physical reactions he experienced to the music he loved attracted him in the same degree as the horrid displays of the hospital laboratories revolted him.

In the theatre listening to Gluck and Spontini “his knees would tremble convulsively, his teeth chatter, he suffered with dizzy spells till he could not stand unsupported, he was bathed in sweat, his scalp contracted, tears choked him, he lost all sensation in fingers and toes, he was seized with chills and hot flashes....

” If this was not actually a type of celestial intoxication it was certainly a romantic imagination conveyed through the empurpled diction of the hour!

Down at his home in the Dauphiné Dr. Berlioz gradually got wind of what was happening and endeavored to reason with his son.

The latter was frequenting the library of the Conservatoire, voraciously devouring the scores of Gluck, and leaving to those who had a taste for that sort of thing the sanguinary details of the anatomical chamber.

And not only did he study the music of Gluck, Méhul and others but he addressed himself to the first two symphonies of Beethoven, at that time as good as unknown in Paris.

In the Conservatoire library he met a certain Hyacinthe Christophe Gerono, a pupil of Lesueur, who counseled Hector to study with his affable old master, at one time a great favorite.

Lesueur received Hector amiably at the first visit, examined a few compositions of the young man, pronounced them faulty but urged him to undertake some preparatory studies under Gerono, a task he willingly accepted.

In a short time Gerono indoctrinated him so thoroughly in Lesueur’s harmonic system that the latter cordially took him as a pupil.

Not that Hector accepted his mentor’s teaching without many unspoken questions, but he quickly decided that the most diplomatic thing to do was to curb whatever impatience he felt and listen in silence.

He had already written a choral work, “Le Passage de la Mer Rouge” and a Mass, and though they were youthful attempts and obviously unripe he found it possible to dispense with conventional rules.

And now he felt moved to attempt an opera!

The obliging Gerono supplied him with a libretto and the fruit of this collaboration was called “Estelle et Némorin,” Estelle Duboeuf doubtless floating before his mind’s eye.

Berlioz admits that the music was “feeble” and called the entire work “wishy-washy”.

As for the Mass, composed by request for the feast day of the choir children of the Church of Saint Roch, portions of it met the approval of Lesueur.

When it came to paying the costs of its performance Hector was in a quandary about raising the necessary 1,200 francs.

Finally he borrowed the sum from a friend, Augustin de Pons—a step he was presently to regret though Pons had lent him the money with the best of intentions.

The Mass itself was praised and some years later was repeated at the Church of St. Eustache.

By this time, however, the composer had become dissatisfied with the work and then burned it together with several juvenile effusions.

Meanwhile he had a stormy first meeting with Cherubini, head of the Conservatoire; and he failed to pass a preliminary examination for that august school.

Hearing of this misfortune, Dr. Berlioz, usually slow to wrath, lost his temper and resolved to stop his son’s allowance.

If anything Lesueur aggravated the situation by attempting to intercede on his pupil’s behalf.

Hector was summoned home and ordered to renounce his ideas of a musical career and take up some other occupation.

In spite of the chilling reception the young black sheep encountered there he was astonished and delighted to learn a few days later that the good doctor had once more reconsidered.

“After several sleepless nights I have made up my mind”, he gravely told his son.

“You shall go to Paris and study music; but only for a time.

If after further trials you fail you will, I am sure, acknowledge that I have done what was right, and you will choose some other career.

You know what I think of second-rate poets;

second-rate artists are no better and it would be a deep sorrow and profound humiliation to me to see you numbered among these useless members of society”.

And he swore the youth to secrecy.

But the news leaked out and before Hector could take his place in the stage-coach his mother, blazing with anger, confronted him “with flashing eyes and exciting gestures”: “Your father”, she exclaimed, “has been weak enough to allow you to return to Paris and to encourage your mad, wicked plans;

but I will not have this guilt on my soul and, once and for all, I forbid your departure ...

I beseech you not to persist in your folly!

See, I, your mother kneel to you and beg you humbly to renounce it”.

And when the appalled Hector begged her to rise she defied him, wildly: “No;

I will kneel!

So, wretched boy, you refuse?

You can stand unmoved with your mother kneeling at your feet?

Well, then, go!

Go and wallow in the filth of Paris, sully your name and kill your father and me with sorrow and shame!

I will not re-enter this house till you have left it.

You are my son no longer!

I curse you!

” Hector had to leave, as he says, “without bidding her good-bye, without another word or a look, and with her curse on my head!

” * * * Back in Paris his first object was to repay Pons part of the money he owed him for the performance of the Saint Roch mass.

He earned a few francs by giving occasional lessons in singing and by teaching flute and guitar.

His monthly allowance amounted only to 120 francs, so the repayment was a slow and painful business.

Most unhappily Pons, wishing to spare Hector this continuous drain on his purse, resolved to “help” his friend by writing Dr. Berlioz and asking him to settle the remainder of the debt.

Pons got his money—but poor Hector lost his allowance!

Somehow he managed to scrape along.

He had a tiny room, five flights up, in the Cité, at the corner of the Quai des Orfèvres and the Rue de Harley; he gave up dining in restaurants and confined his diet to dry bread and salt, with now and then raisins or dates.

When the weather was favorable he took this meal on the Pont Neuf, beside the statue of Henri IV, watching the passersby or gazing at the muddy waters of the Seine.

He worked tirelessly at his music.

Cherubini, now apparently mollified, put the youth into Reicha’s class for counterpoint and fugue at the Conservatoire, even while he continued with Lesueur.

Hector struck up a life-long friendship with young Humbert Ferrand, who wrote him an opera book, “Les Franc-Juges”—“The Judges of the Secret Court”—which he enthusiastically set to music but of which only the overture remains.

It is a fine thing of its type, bearing melodically, instrumentally and harmonically, the unmistakable imprint of Berlioz even to the reminders of Gluck.

One of its most striking themes survives from the boyish quintet of Hector’s and anticipates in a fashion the “idée fixe” of the “Symphonie Fantastique”, not very far ahead.

Working on his opera young Berlioz had somewhat neglected his flute and guitar pupils and once more needed money.

Even a franc a lesson would not help greatly when it became a question of winter clothes and firewood.

Far from capitulating and returning, beaten, to Dauphiné, he first toyed with the idea of seeking a position as first or second flute in some orchestra “in New York, Mexico, Sydney or Calcutta, of becoming a sailor, filibuster, buccaneer or savage in China” or attempting any other wild scheme since “it is futile and dangerous to thwart my will when I am resolved on anything”.

In the end he tried a safer, less exciting method.

Aided by a streak of luck and an exceptionally good musical memory, he obtained an engagement as a chorus singer at the Théâtre des Nouveautés, where basses were wanted but where a passable baritone could also be of use.

By singing as a trial piece a recitative from Sacchini’s “Oedipe” he prevailed over a weaver, a blacksmith, an actor and a choir member from St. Eustache.

The job paid him fifty francs a month.

Hector had not only to sing all manner of rubbish but “the colossal manager”, a Mr. St. Léger, sometimes obliged him to be “the rear leg of an artificial camel”!

Even so, it was luck of a sort.

At the same time, two new pupils applied for lessons and he met Antoine Charbonnel, a young man from La Côte-Saint-André, whose father had often scandalized Mme.

Berlioz because, being a tireless woman chaser, he flew in the face of her family’s ancient motto, “respectability above everything”.

Charbonnel, a budding pharmacist, found it advisable to share economics with Hector and the pair set up bachelor quarters in two little rooms in the Rue de la Harpe.

Charbonnel cooked and Hector marketed, grossly violating the hygienic codes of his friend by carrying the day’s provisions unwrapped under his arm.

* * * Hector calls the “Francs-Juges” overture his “first grand instrumental work”.

It was soon followed by another overture, “Waverly”.

He was, he tells us, so ignorant of the mechanism of certain instruments at that period, that he had written the trombone solo in the earlier score in the key of D flat, uncertain whether this choice of tonality was a wise one or not.

On submitting the passage to a trombone player at the Opéra he was delighted to learn that it was the best possible key for the purpose and that the solo in question could not fail to produce a powerful effect.

Greatly elated he walked home as in a dream and was recalled to himself by suddenly spraining his ankle.

From that moment he could never hear the piece without experiencing a sharp pain in his foot.

“Perhaps”, he muses in his Memoirs, “it gives others a pain in their heads”!

Curiously enough, neither Reicha nor Lesueur, taught him anything about instrumentation.

Thanks to a friend at the Opéra he obtained free tickets and by close listening at such performances and study of such scores as were given he “perceived the subtle connection between musical expression and the special art of instrumentation, which no one had actually pointed out to me.

It was by studying the methods of ...

Beethoven, Weber and Spontini; by an impartial examination of the regular forms of instrumentation, and of unusual forms and combinations; partly by listening to artists and getting them to make experiments for me on their instruments, and partly by instinct, that I acquired what knowledge I possess” and was later to disseminate in his great treatise on instrumentation, subsequently modernized by Richard Strauss.

* * * Hector was officially admitted to the Conservatoire when, the next examination period having come around, he succeeded at last in passing the test.

He was less fortunate with an orchestral _scena_ on the death of Orpheus which the students were required to compose, though Berlioz ascribed his failure to the incompetence of a mediocre pianist obliged to play the reduction of the original score.

He had obtained a brief leave from his duties at the Théâtre des Nouveautés when he came down with a dangerous attack of quinsy sore throat.

Alone one night and on the point of strangling he suddenly sat down before his shaving mirror, seized a pen knife and, in a paroxysm of agony, lanced the obstruction which was suffocating him.

By some miracle he was on his feet again in a few days and had the satisfaction of hearing from his suddenly repentant father that his allowance was to be restored.

Having no further need of continuing his chorister chores he was now free to devote his evenings to opera performances.

These evenings, he declares, were “solemn” occasions.

They could be tumultous ones, as well; for Hector was violent when matters outraged him and as often as not became an irrepressible clacqueur.

More than once he helped precipitate riots in the theatre.

When at a performance of “Iphigénie en Tauride,” for instance, cymbals were introduced into a ballet passage where Gluck has only strings and when trombones were omitted from a passage in Orestes’ third act recitative Hector would suddenly shout with all his might: “There are no cymbals there; who has dared to correct Gluck?

” Then, in an Orestes passage: “Not a sign of a trombone; it is intolerable!

” Again, during a performance of Dalayrac’s “Nina” Berlioz missed a violin solo scheduled to be played by the violinist, Baillot.

Just as the cue for the expected solo was reached a furious voice was heard to exclaim: “So far good, but where is the violin solo?

” “Very true”, cried someone else, “it looks as if they were going to leave it out.

Baillot, Baillot, the violin solo.

” The pit took fire, the entire house rose and loudly demanded that the program should be carried out according to schedule.

Before long people dashed into the orchestra, overturning chairs and music desks, smashing the kettledrums.

Meanwhile, Hector who had sown the wind tried to control the whirlwind with sarcastic protests: “Gentlemen, don’t smash the instruments!

What vandalism!

Don’t you see you are destroying Father Chenie’s beautiful double-bass, with its infernal tone?

” But the mob was beyond control and broke not only instruments but innumerable seats and music stands as well!

* * * It was 1827 and he was beginning to harbor more far-darting ambitions.

In June he planned to try for the Prix de Rome, though he really laid small value on the “honor” the winning of it conferred.

How often was it no more than a means to an end!

Three times Berlioz competed (four if we count the preliminary test of 1826, in which he failed), but not till 1830 did he carry off the honor.

In 1827 he had written for the purpose “La Mort d’Orphée”, in 1828 he gained the second prize, in 1829 (when no prize was finally given) he turned out a “Cléopâtre”—which, had it been less audacious, might have won him the award—while in 1830 his cantata, “Sardanapale”, finally achieved the ultimate distinction.

But this honor, so highly regarded among the rank and file of Frenchmen, was for Hector soon to turn to something like Dead Sea fruit.

On Sept.

11, 1827, Kemble’s company from London inaugurated a Shakespearian season at the Odéon Theatre.

“Hamlet” was the first offering, with the famous English actor in the title role.

The Ophelia was Henrietta Smithson, tall, lithe and Irish.

All literary and artistic Paris was on hand.

From the moment the daughter of Polonius stepped on the stage Hector was lost!

No thunderbolt could more completely have devastated him.

When the performance ended he rushed home, avoiding all acquaintances to whom he might have had to talk.

Then he went out again and walked all night along the Seine, determined to wear himself out to obtain the temporary solace of sleep.

It was useless.

Next evening the visitors were giving “Romeo and Juliet”.

Hector dashed to the Odéon early in the day and bought himself a ticket, to be sure no unforeseen hitch might prevent him obtaining his usual admission.

As he knew no word of English, he procured a translation and strove for a few hours to recreate in his mind a picture of Henrietta Smithson before again looking upon her in the flesh.

If possible the effect of the previous evening was intensified.

He would now wander aimlessly through suburbs and countryside, sometimes even sleeping in open fields; or he would set to music Irish lyrics by Thomas Moore; or steep himself in more Shakespeare, dabble in Byron and Walter Scott, set about discovering Goethe and acquainting himself with “Faust!

” He moved from the quarters of his friend Charbonnel and installed himself in a room in the Rue Richelieu directly opposite the house where Henrietta lived.

He had never so much as exchanged a word with the actress who, for her part, never yet dreamed that such a person as Hector Berlioz existed—let alone that he loved her wildly.

Nonetheless, Hector made a point of avoiding further Shakespeare performances—or so at least, he claims in his Memoirs.

“More experiences of the kind would have killed me!

” But the inspiration of this Juliet and Ophelia, further enhanced by the romantic literature with which he was suffusing himself and the grandeur of those Beethoven works he was beginning to discover, were stimulating his creative fancy.

He wrote overtures based on “Waverly”, “King Lear”, “The Corsair”; he wrote (in 1829) “Eight Scenes from Faust” and a “Ballade of the King of Thule, in Gothic Style” (things which were later to form the basis of “La Damnation de Faust”); he composed a set of “Nine Irish Songs”; above all, he wrote (and then revised) a work which was to become, in some respects, his most widely known and famous, the “Symphonie Fantastique”—a kind of symphonic phantasmagoria, with Henrietta as its chief motivation and himself as its chief actor.

It was not till December, 1827, that the actress first had a fleeting glimpse of her worshipper.

This happened quite by chance at a rehearsal for a benefit performance at the Opéra-Comique where Hector was to offer an overture of his and where some of the English actors were to perform a couple of Shakespearian scenes.

By this time he had begun to write her letters, to which she never replied, for they frightened her and she presently ordered her maid not to accept any more from the postman.

When Berlioz at a rehearsal caught sight of Henrietta talking to her colleagues backstage he uttered a loud cry and rushed from the theatre, wildly wringing his hands.

Thinking she had to do with a madman the actress begged her associates to watch him closely, for “she did not like the look of his eyes”.

The mop of red hair that surmounted his head like an umbrella, his gaunt visage, fiery appearance and generally hysterical demeanor must have given her reason for alarm and she probably breathed more freely when she left Paris for Holland.