Was it “absolutely groundless”? The composer’s intimate associate, Ernest Legouvé, has let us into many secrets about the rift in the lute in his book “Soixante Ans de Souvenirs”. The blond Irishwoman, some years older than her husband, was gradually losing her looks, her failures as an actress had for some time increasingly embittered her and she presently took to drink. The more the sentiments of the formerly so ardent Hector “changed to a correct and calm good fellowship”, says Legouvé, “the more his wife became imperious in her exigencies and indulged in violent recriminations that were unfortunately justified. Berlioz, whose position as critic and as composer producing his own works made the theatre his real world, found there occasions for lapses that would have proved too much for stronger heads than his; moreover, his reputation as a misunderstood great artist endowed him with a halo that easily tempted his female interpreters to become his consolers. Madame Berlioz searched his feuilletons for hints of his infidelities. And not only there: fragments of intercepted letters, drawers indiscreetly opened, brought her revelations just sufficient to make her beside herself without more than half-illuminating her. Her jealousy was always outdistanced by the facts. Berlioz’s heart went so fast that she could not keep pace with it; when, after so much research, she lighted upon some object of his passion, that particular passion was no more; and then, it being easy for him to prove his innocence at the moment, the poor woman was as abashed as a dog which after having followed a track for half an hour, arrives at the lair only to find the quarry already gone”. Yet the jealous instincts of the once lovely Ophelia and Juliet were, in fact, only too sound and, if her shrewishness increased by leaps and bounds, she had no little cause for it.
Berlioz’s first wife
Berlioz’s second wife
Hector’s friends seemed, perhaps, a little less devoted to him since his marriage, and since his miseries were a trifle less spectacular than they had been during his bachelor days. But these comrades included not a few personages illustrious in their respective spheres. Among them were the musical chroniclers Janin and d’Ortigue; the essayists and novelists Legouvé, Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas, Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo; among the creative and performing musicians, Liszt of course and Chopin, who though personally the antithesis of Berlioz, never wavered in his faithfulness to the man. And further, flashing like a comet across the firmament of Hector, there was the “demon fiddler”, Paganini.
In 1834 Berlioz composed the “descriptive” symphony “Harold in Italy”, in which Byron’s Childe Harold, the central figure of the work was represented by a viola solo. Whether Hector’s account of the genesis of the composition is wholly authentic or not, the tale he relates in his Memoirs runs somewhat as follows: Having heard the “Symphonie Fantastique” one day Paganini came to see the composer and told him that he owned a wonderful Stradivari viola which he would love to play in public, though he had no music for it which he considered suitable. Would Hector write him such a work? He had no confidence in anyone else. The only thing the violinist insisted upon was that “he must be playing the whole time”. The work should not be an ordinary concerto, but rather something along the lines of the “Fantastique”. After many doubts and hesitations the composer produced a series of scenes for orchestra, the pictorial background of which was shaped out of Hector’s recollections of his Italian wanderings; while the viola strain, representing Byron’s dreamer, was added to the rest of the orchestral texture “with which it contrasts both in movement and character, without hindering the development”.
Paganini did not hear the symphony till some time after it had been first performed, for he had been south, vainly seeking relief from that cancer of the larynx which had robbed him of his voice and was shortly to prove fatal. At the close of the work he ordered his son to tell the composer “he had never in his life been so impressed at a concert” and were he to follow his inclination, he would “go down on his knees to thank him”. And then, in full view of the audience, the great violinist did just that and kissed Hector’s hand! Next day he received a letter in Paganini’s writing which ran: “Beethoven is dead and Berlioz alone can revive him. I have heard your divine compositions, so worthy of your genius, and beg you to accept, in token of my homage, twenty thousand francs....”
Almost on the heels of this windfall Berlioz had the additional luck of being commissioned by the government to compose a Requiem, for an official ceremony. The work is one of his most monumental—one might say apocalyptic—even if the quality of its musical inspiration may be open to question. One thing however, is certain—nothing he ever wrote is so overwhelming in point of sheer sonority as the appalling Tuba Mirum, with its five orchestras, its sixteen kettle drums and its phalanxes of trombones. At the climax of this fresco of the Last Judgment one of the participating singers succumbed in public to a shrieking frenzy of nervous prostration!
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