Famous composers and their works, Vol. 3

by Unknown

HECTOR BERLIOZ

More than a score of years have passed since Berlioz died, in Paris, that city which was the object of his youthful dreams, the scene of his bitter struggles and his sublime defeats. It was in the midst of those Parisians, who had accorded him little more than mockery and scorn, that he had wished to die, weighed down by sadness and discouragement, supported by a few intimate friends and rare disciples. Moreover, did he not foresee that sad end when writing the following lines which subsequent events proved only too true? “It was about that time of my academic life that I experienced again the attack of a cruel malady (moral, nervous, imaginary, whatever you like) which I will call sickness of isolation, and which will kill me some day.... This is not spleen, though it leads to that later on; it is the boiling away, the evaporation of the heart, the senses, the brain, the nervous fluid. Spleen is the congelation of all that, it is the block of ice.” Therefore death was for him a blessed release. For some years before, there remained of Hector Berlioz nothing but an earthly frame, an inert and suffering body; the moral being was crushed. The fall of The Trojans was the rudest possible shock to that nature so well tempered to receive it; hitherto the proud artist had returned blow for blow; never had a defeat, however grave, completely overthrown him. For the first time, in witnessing the downfall of the work of his predilection, the athlete had faltered. He had laid down his arms and thenceforth, weary of life and of the struggle, had contented himself with the hollow diversions which the capital offered him, “preoccupied solely with material interests, inattentive and indifferent to that which impassions poets and artists, having a morbid taste for scandal and mockery, laughing with a dry and mirthless laugh when this strange taste is gratified.” A certain heartache, a vague suffering of the soul, vain regrets, preyed upon him at least as much as bodily ills; his shade alone wandered among us, dumb, taciturn, isolated, and one beautiful morning in the month of March it vanished.

Berlioz’s militant career may be divided into two distinct periods; that in which he struggles for position, and which lasts from his arrival in Paris until after Romeo and Juliet and the Funeral and Triumphal Symphony, in 1842; that in which, tired of struggling without profit though not without glory, he starts off to establish his reputation outside the frontier, and to return afterwards to Paris, victorious and triumphant; this lasts until his death. So soon as he achieved a success abroad, great or small, “Be sure that Paris knows it!” was the cry to his friends. And Paris, being informed of it, had forgotten it instantly. It was during the intervals between these tours, when he came back to France to see if his foreign successes had given him a better standing in the eyes of his countrymen, that his last principal works were produced: The Damnation of Faust, The Childhood of Christ, The Te Deum and Beatrice and Benedict, finally The Trojans.

It was towards the end of 1821 that Berlioz came to Paris, ostensibly to study medicine, but with a secret longing to devote himself to music. He was then nearly eighteen years of age, being born at La Côte Saint-André (Isère), Dec. 11, 1803, and had already received some lessons in music from the poor stranded artists at La Côte. We are indebted to Berlioz himself for the names of these artists, which were Imbert and Dorant.

On arriving at Paris, where his father, a simple health officer, but a devotee to the sciences and to medicine, had allowed him to come on the express condition that he should follow exactly the course of the Faculty, he set to work as best he could to carry out this program. But one evening he goes to the Opera to hear Salieri’s Danaïdes: immediately music regains possession of his soul, and he spends all his spare time in the library of the Conservatoire, studying the scores of Gluck’s operas; there he meets a pupil of Lesueur who introduces him to that master, and he attaches himself with much affection to the author of the Bardes, who admits him to his class. At length he informs his family of his settled determination to devote himself to music, and he has performed at Saint-Roch a mass which he burns almost immediately after, saving only the Resurrexit which obtains grace in his sight, at least for a time. He then took part in the preparatory concours for the prize of Rome, and was not even judged worthy to be a competitor. Immediately summoned home by his parents, who had no faith in his “pretended irresistible vocation,” he arrived there so sad, so crushed, so misanthropic, that his father, uneasy about him, permitted him to return to try once more his fortune in Paris. He came back for the winter of 1826, having nothing to live on but a small allowance from his family, on which he was obliged to economize in order to pay back, little by little, a loan which a friend had made him for the execution of his mass. His existence at this time, which was shared by another student, his friend Carbonnel, was a very miserable one, their meals consisting on certain days of vegetables and dried fruits. He gave lessons in solfeggio at a franc a lesson, and even applied for the position of chorus singer at the Théâtre des Nouveautés. But artistic pleasures counterbalanced the material privations, and his heart danced for joy whenever he could go to the Opéra or to the Odéon and hear some masterpiece by Spontini, Gluck or Weber; his fourth god, Beethoven, was not revealed to him till two years later, when Habeneck founded the Société des concerts du Conservatoire for the dissemination of the works of that prodigious genius. He continued however in the classes of Lesueur and Reicha, so that he was able to pass the preliminary examination for the concours of 1828. The subject given out by the board of examiners was a scene from Orpheus torn to pieces by Bacchantes, and Berlioz’s music was declared by the judges as impossible to be played. His only response was to prepare for its performance at the concert to be given at the Conservatoire, the superintendent of the Beaux-Arts, M. de Larochefoucauld, to whom he had been recommended, having placed that hall at his disposal, notwithstanding the violent protestations of the director, Cherubini. But chance favored the self-love of the members of the Institute, for Berlioz was obliged to give up his plan, on account of an indisposition of the singer Alexis Dupont.

It would have been strange indeed, if Berlioz, with his ardent imagination and brain always on fire, had allowed the romantic movement to pass by without attaching himself to it with all the fury and passion which he threw into everything. He soon became one of the leaders of the new school, poor enough in musicians, counting only himself and Monpau, whereas it abounded in writers and artists. Like all his comrades in romanticism, even exceeding them all, Berlioz was an enthusiastic and constant visitor at the Odéon, where some of Shakespeare’s plays were then being given by a company of English tragedians. Here he received a double blow; from Shakespeare who floored him, as he said, and from Miss Smithson who intoxicated him. It was to attract the attention of the beautiful tragedienne that he organized, with his overtures to Waverley and Francs-Juges and his cantata of la Mort d’Orphée, a concert which she never heard anything about. It was also this idea of reaching her through the medium of music which inspired him to write his Fantastic Symphony, in which he put himself in the scene with his beloved, and which, in fact, was to end by gaining him Miss Smithson’s heart.

As these first attempts of Berlioz are little known, it is well to specify them, if for no other reason than because one may find in these forgotten pieces the plan of certain pages of the Damnation of Faust and the Childhood of Christ. His overtures to Waverley and to the Francs-Juges were performed for the first time at the concert which he gave at the Conservatoire, in honor of Miss Smithson, May 26, 1828; on this occasion he also had played the Resurrexit from his first mass, in place of The Death of Orpheus, which could not be given owing to the illness of Alexis Dupont, a march of the Magi going to visit the manger, and a grand scene on the Greek Revolution. Finally, on the 1st of November, 1829, he had his two overtures repeated, together with his Resurrexit under a new title, The Last Judgment, and a new work entitled Chorus of Sylphs, the plan of which is as follows: “Mephistopheles, in order to excite in Faust’s soul the love of pleasure, assembles the sprites of the air and bids them sing. After a prelude on their magic instruments, they describe an enchanted country, the inhabitants of which are intoxicated with perpetual delights. Gradually the charm operates, the voices of the Sylphs die away and Faust, fallen asleep, remains plunged in delicious dreams.” Everybody knows to-day what this adorable bit has become.

In the meantime Berlioz obtained the “Prix de Rome” in July, 1830, after having tried for it four times in vain. He set out at once for Rome, first giving, however, a farewell concert at which was played his cantata of Sardanapalus and the Fantastic Symphony, aimed at Miss Smithson whom Berlioz execrated because of her ignorant indifference, and who, moreover, had not the slightest suspicion of his mad passion and frantic hatred. The young composer departed quite proud of his success and also of the sharp response of Cherubini who said, when asked if he was going to hear the new production of Berlioz, “I do not need to go to find out how things should not be done.” He stayed in Italy nearly two years, in order to conform to the regulations of the Academy, but it was time wasted for him from an artistic point of view. With his just and profound distaste for Italian music, he was in no condition to be benefited by it. The only comfort he took was in fleeing to the country, where he strolled with his new friend Mendelssohn; but this companionship proved uncongenial and was short-lived. He shortened his sojourn in Italy as much as possible, and as soon as the director Horace Vernet gave him leave, he returned to Paris, taking with him an overture to King Lear and the monodrama of Lelio or the Return to Life, a series of old pieces worked over, which completed the Fantastic Symphony. This work he could have done just as well in Paris as in Rome; indeed he would probably have accomplished more by remaining in Paris, instead of strolling about the country near Rome playing on his guitar and frittering away his time.