Hector Berlioz, born December 11, 1803, at La Côte St. André, a small town in south-eastern France, began his long struggle with the world when, in his nineteenth year, in Paris, whither his parents had sent him to become a doctor like his father, he resolved to abandon the study of medicine for that of music. It was a daring, indeed a rash, resolve, worthy of a born dissenter like Berlioz; for not only were all external forces clearly in league to keep him in the beaten path, but his vocation for music was as yet far from obvious. He played only the flageolet, the flute, and the guitar; his knowledge of harmony was of the slightest; and he himself tells us in his autobiography that he had never seen a full score, but that one day when he found a sheet of paper ruled with twenty-five staves he "realized in a moment the wondrous instrumental and vocal combinations to which they might give rise, and cried out, 'What an orchestral work one might write on that!'" The impulse was there, if the technique was wanting; and when the young medical student chanced to hear a performance of Gluck's "Iphigénie en Tauride," his smouldering enthusiasm burst at once into unquenchable flame, and he resolved at all hazards to become a musician.
He introduced himself to Lesueur, professor of composition at the Conservatoire, with a cantata in which there were many blunders in harmony, but a good deal of dramatic power also, and on the strength of it became his pupil. He studied the scores of Gluck's operas in the Conservatoire library. With characteristic audacity he proposed to the aged Andrieux, lecturer on literature in the school of medicine, that he should write for him an opera libretto, but received a courteous refusal. He did not hesitate to borrow twelve hundred francs from a friend as a means of producing at the church of Saint-Roch a mass he had written. And all this time he was raising obstacles for himself by his enthusiastic impulsiveness and his utter lack of tact and worldly discretion. The story of his first meeting with Cherubini, a man of far-reaching influence as the director of the Conservatoire, will serve as an example. Cherubini, who was a cold and formal precisian, had made a strict ruling that the male and female readers at the Conservatoire library should enter by different doors. Berlioz "did not see the notice," entered by the women's door, and immediately buried himself in the score of "Alceste." Presently he was recalled to this world by finding Cherubini standing beside him, "a thin, cadaverous figure with a pale face, tumbled hair, and fierce, gleaming eyes." Then arose an angry altercation, ended by the director's ordering the porter to eject the offending student, and a lively chase among the desks. Berlioz, reaching the door, only stopped to announce to the enraged Cherubini that he was "soon coming back to study Gluck again." He did so; but he never conciliated the ill-will of his powerful enemy, who from that day lost no opportunity to frustrate his ambitions.
It was indeed his failure to win one of the Conservatoire prizes, which lost for him the countenance of his parents and plunged him into many misfortunes. His mother at this time threw him off entirely, in anger for which there was much justification; his father, more patient, allowed him a period of probation, after which, if he could not show himself a successful musician, he was to return to the study of medicine. Thus put upon his mettle, he rented a closet of a room up five flights of stairs, lived on bread, raisins, prunes, and dates, and eked out his allowance by taking pupils on the guitar and the flute, and in solfeggio. In this way he even managed to pay half of his debt to the friend who had helped him produce his mass. But alas! this man, as careless and devoid of tact as Berlioz himself, then wrote to the father the story of the loan, requesting a payment in full. Who can wonder that Dr. Berlioz, his toleration at last exhausted, upon paying the balance of the debt cut off entirely the allowance? Not even then, however, would Berlioz accept defeat, but, getting a post as chorus singer in one of the small theatres, continued the struggle to attain the prize on which so much depended. Could he but gain the Prix de Rome, he would be assured an annuity of three thousand francs for five years, the first two to be spent in the French Academy at Rome, the third in Germany, and the last two at home: he would be free to study and compose at leisure, he could show the world and his parents what was in him.
The subject prescribed for the competition in 1826 was the death of Orpheus, on which he proceeded to wreak himself with an ardor we can well imagine. The result was that his bacchanal scene was pronounced unplayable by the mediocre pianist provided to play the pieces to the jury. Berlioz was furious—and most of all, characteristically, at the injustice done his orchestration. "The piano," he cries, "at once reduces all composers to the same level, and places the clever, profound, ingenious instrumentalist on the same platform with the ignorant dunce who knows nothing of this branch of his art. The piano is a guillotine, and severs the head of noble or of churl with the same impartial indifference." As the time of the next trial approached, Berlioz with his usual impolitic frankness made such a nuisance of himself, by criticising in a loud voice, from the pit of the opera house, the liberties taken with the scores of the great masters, that he was debarred altogether by the scandalized authorities. In 1828, missing the first prize by two votes, one of them Cherubini's, he obtained the second prize, consisting of a laurel wreath, a not very valuable gold medal, and a free pass to the opera-house. Still invincible, he prepared himself to storm once more the pedantry of the judges; he did his best, but, in the words of Boïeldieu, "they found his best too good," and in 1829 the prize was not awarded at all. It was not until 1830 that, at last learning by experience, he wrote his cantata of "Sardanapalus" in the dryest and most conservative style he could compass, leaving out altogether the conflagration scene, which might have proved unplayable, and at any rate would have disturbed the tranquillity of the judges. Discretion won the day; the prize was awarded him, and he was free to depart for Rome, and to finish his cantata to his own satisfaction, which we may be sure he lost no time in doing.
In the meantime, as if these struggles were not enough to engage all his energies, he had been busy playing the first scene of that love-tragedy, or melodrama, or farce—one hardly knows what to call it—which ended by joining him in uneasy and brief wedlock with Henriette Smithson, an Irish actress. It is hard to tell how far the throes of his very Gallic heart were genuine, how far they were manufactured by his susceptible fancy, his literary imagination, and his keen sense for dramatic effect. There is ever about Berlioz a trace of the little boy playing pirate chief; he goes through life with something of that youthful ecstasy of make-believe; and when he tells us of his passions for Mdlles. S——, R——, and M——, when he enumerates his thrills, commemorates his tears, and confides his plans for capture, flight, suicide, or double murder, we wonder whether he really felt all this, or is merely convinced, as a poet and journalist, that he ought thus to have acted.
It was in 1827 that Berlioz first beheld his future wife, who was acting Shakespeare at the Odéon in a troupe of English players. Of the effect of her Juliet upon him he writes, "After the third act, hardly breathing, in pain as if a hand of iron were squeezing at my heart, I said to myself, with the fullest conviction: 'Ah! I am lost.'" Did he make any attempt to meet the lady whose beauty and genius had so singularly affected him? Not he; such a course would have been painfully commonplace, a terrible descent from poetry to prose. He followed her about with gaunt eyes and dishevelled mien, so that, believing him mad, she asked her friends for protection. He lost himself in melancholy revery, he roamed about the streets at night, in such despair that on one occasion Liszt and Chopin followed him, fearing he might kill himself. Then he rallied his forces in a great resolve; he would win his indifferent mistress by his art; he would give a concert of his own works, and she should hear it. "I will show her," he cried, forgetting in his enthusiasm that she had no ear for music, "that I too am an artist." After heroic labors and economies (for it was at this time that he was supporting himself by singing in the theatre chorus, and he had to work sixteen hours a day copying instrumental parts), after endless struggles with his conductor, who did not understand the music, and with Cherubini, who refused him the only available concert hall, he succeeded in bringing off the concert, only to find that Miss Smithson did not hear of it at all. Shortly afterward she left France for some years.
Disconsolate, Berlioz turned for comfort to a certain Mademoiselle Mooke, to whom he became engaged in 1830, soon after winning the Prix de Rome. This affair, however, went little more smoothly than the other, for hardly had he arrived in Italy before he received a letter from Madame Mooke, informing him that her daughter had married M. Pleyel. His rôle was thus suddenly changed to that of the abandoned lover, thirsting for revenge; and it must be conceded that he entered upon it with his usual artistic enthusiasm. "Two tears of rage started from my eyes, and my mind was made up on the spot. I meant to fly to Paris, where I had two guilty women and one innocent man"—one sees that magnanimity was a part of the rôle—"to kill without mercy. As for killing myself afterwards, you can well believe that that was indispensable." Behold him, then, in Florence, supplying himself with two double-barrelled pistols, "two vials of refreshment, such as laudanum and strychnine," and, as a disguise, the entire costume of a lady's-maid—no less—dress, bonnet, green veil, and all. Behold him hesitating but one moment, just long enough to write upon the unfinished score of the Ball Scene in his "Symphonie Fantastique" directions as to how, if the work is played "in his absence," the flute part may be doubled with the clarinets and horns. Behold him, after this lucid interval, travelling to Genoa, where he either attempts suicide by drowning or falls into the water and is fished out by bystanders—his account is somewhat ambiguous—and where he buys a second lady's-maid's costume, having absent-mindedly left the first one in the coach. And then, with his arrival at Nice, he feels that he has done his duty by the part of the wronged lover, he feels that it would be a pity to deprive the world of his still unwritten compositions; youth pleads the charm of life, the beauty of the Italian landscape, and prudence suggests a brief note to the director of the Academy at Rome, providing for a possible return to the fold. "I stop in Nice a whole month, wandering through the orange groves, diving in the sea, sleeping on the mountain heaths.... I live wholly alone, and write the overture to 'King Lear.' I sing, I believe in God. Convalescence has set in." "It is thus," he ingenuously concludes his account of this episode, "that I passed in Nice the twenty happiest days of my life."
On returning to Paris, in 1832, and finding Miss Smithson again playing there, Berlioz tried again, and this time with success, the device of giving a concert of his own works. His "Symphonie Fantastique" and its sequel "Lelio," a monodrama with recitation, were given entire. Whatever might be her ignorance of music, Miss Smithson could hardly fail to divine the reference to herself of a typical passage in the text of "Lelio": "O that I could find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia, that my heart calls to. That I could drink in the intoxication of that mingled joy and sadness that only true love knows! Could I but rest in her arms one autumn evening, rocked by the north wind on some wild heath, and sleep my last, sad sleep!" This somewhat florid wooing was effective; on the day after the concert the oddly assorted pair met for the first time, and in the following summer were married. In taking this daring step Berlioz seems for once to have manfully forgotten his audience and his dramatic unities, and to have acted quite simply and from the heart. His Ophelia was no longer a favorite of the public; she was now neglected and deeply in debt; she had had the misfortune to break her leg in stepping from her carriage, an accident which threatened to end her career on the stage; her parents, as well as his own, were bitterly opposed to the match. In spite of all, Berlioz married her, and made no literary material out of the event except to weave about it one of his incisive antitheses: "On the day of our wedding she had nothing but debts; I, for my part, had three hundred francs ... and had quarrelled again with my parents. But she was mine, I bade defiance to everything." It is much to his credit, too, that when his wife was ill, he quite simply set aside a symphony at which he was working, and wrote feuilletons in order to make more money for her.
But the one thing to which Berlioz could never effectually bid defiance was the radical inconstancy of his own temperament. Once captured and domesticated, his Ophelia began to prove dull; the part of husband gave little play to his romantic capacities; and when he took less and less pains to disguise his boredom, she became jealous even to shrewishness. Presently he sought distraction in the least creditable of all his amours. If the Smithson affair had been drama, or at the least melodrama, and the Mooke episode harmless comedy, the liaison with Mademoiselle Recio, aside from its tragic results, was broad farce. This lady was a second-rate vocalist with an insatiable ambition to sing Berlioz's works, in order to defeat which he had often to resort to ignominious flight, covered by petty prevarication. His devotion to her cannot have resulted in much happiness, and it entirely alienated him from his wife, from whom he separated about 1840. Nevertheless, when she died in 1854, he promptly married this Mademoiselle Recio, with whom he lived in uneasy partnership for eight years.
One of the strangest instances of his morbid appetite for effect at any cost, of the habit of posturing and parading his emotions which ruled him even in matters which should be most private and sacred, is the passage in the autobiography in which he describes, with a Poe-like zest for revolting detail, the reburial of his first wife beside the second in the cemetery of Mont-Martre. The incredible passage need not be quoted in detail, but ends with this sentence, in which the egotism of the sentimentalist stands as naked as it is unashamed: "The two departed ones rest here in peace [sic] to this hour, awaiting the time when I shall bring my own portion of rottenness to that charnel-house." This is an extreme instance of the posturing, the attitudinizing, the grandiloquence and rhetoric, to which Berlioz is always tempted more or less in his accounts of his personal doings and feelings. He does not wilfully misrepresent, but he balks at the grayness of mere fact; he is not exactly a liar, but his romantic imagination simply cannot envisage the commonplace; involuntarily he suppresses here, distorts or exaggerates there, in order that his story may have the spectacular vividness, the dramatic éclat, which alone can satisfy him.