Berlioz: The Genius Who Was a Bit Crazy

Hector Berlioz:   A Genius Who Was a Bit Crazy

Hector Berlioz, the French composer who lived from1803 to 1869, was a strange man. Among the things that made him strange was his tendency to fall madly in love with various women. I want to emphasize the word “madly.” And it wasn’t necessarily a beauteous Helen of Troy he would fall in love with. Later on, I’ll show you a picture of a woman whom he was madly in love with. Prepare to be shocked.

When Berlioz was young, he attended an opera by Gluck, and was so enchanted that he decided to become a composer. But his parents were not musicians and were vehemently against his writing music.

His father, a physician, wanted Hector to follow in his footsteps. His mother was also adamantly opposed to her son’s studying music. She yelled at him: “Go and wallow  in the filth of Paris, sully our name, and kill your father and myself  with sorrow and shame! You are no longer my son! I curse you!” No wonder poor Berlioz had trouble with women later in life.

   

 Hector wound up studying to become  physician. It was not a match made in heaven.  When Hector first entered the dissecting room of a hospital,  his biographer Victor Seroff reports,  he almost fainted upon seeing a litter of corpse fragments, ghastly faces and open skulls, sparrows fighting over bits of lungs, rats gnawing at bloody vertebrae, and smelling the horrible stench.

No, he didn’t become a doctor. He gave up medicine and enrolled at the music conservatory in Paris. As a result, his father stopped sending him money and Berlioz had to live in squalor, dining on stale bread, raisins, and prunes.

He was as a result much alone, as his biographer writes, and was denied the normal companionship of schoolmates. “I know perfectly well,” Berlioz wrote, “that at 25 I was still an awkward, ignorant child.”

As a composer, Berlioz was unusual, too. He didn’t play the piano. He played the flute, the guitar, and the drum. And generally he was self-taught. Not so surprising, then, that he was so original. His music had long melodies, changing rhythms, complex orchestration, Listening to operas (he could attend free), he had become so knowledgeable about the various instruments that he revolutionized orchestration. But then and now, audiences had trouble appreciating his music.  This year’s WQXR Classical Countdown had only one Berlioz piece in the top 100: The Symphonie fantastique, 98^th on the list.  No Roman Carnival Overture, no Harold in Italy.

Getting back to his love life: At the age of 12, Berlioz had become infatuated with a  woman named Estelle Duboeuf, age 18. But although he obsessed over her, for years he was so shy that he hardly dared talk to her. But don’t forget the name of his first love: Estelle.

In 1827, when Berlioz was 24, he saw a performace of Hamlet given by an English company in Paris. Playing Ophelia along with Juliet was an Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, age 27. He fell in love—madly. He tried to meet her, wrote her letter after letter, but all he succeeded in doing was scaring the hell out of her.  By the way, she didn’t speak French and he didn’t speak English. Not an auspicious beginning to a happy relationship.

Harriet Smithson

http://www.oae.co.uk/hector-harriet-love-tragedy-and-the-bard/

Harriet Smithson was considered a so-so actress, but physically attractive. “Tall, well-built, and handsome” is what she was called.

Berlioz became so depressed because he couldn’t meet her that, at night, he would walk around Paris and fall asleep wherever he was. Once he fell asleep for 5 hours on a table in a  Paris café. Waiters didn’t try to awaken him because they thought he was dead.

But finally…finally…there was good news. After failing three times to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, in 1827 he finally aucceeded. (Maurice Ravel later would fail four times.) This entitled him to a five-year scholarship, three of those years to be spent in Italy.

He didn’t think much of Italy or of its music. (In general, Berlioz had very high standards.) He positively loathed Donizetti’s music. Italians, he claimed, knew almost nothing about Beethoven and Mozart. The better-educated Italians, he reported, did know that Mozart was dead. As for Italians and music, “They like music that they can absorb at first hearing, without reflection or attention, just like a plate of macaroni.” As for the city of Rome, he wrote, "Rome is the most stupid and prosaic city I know; it is no place for anyone with head or heart."

In Italy he met Mendelssohn, and they became good friends, even though Mendelssohn thought Berlioz didn’t have a “spark of talent” and wrote “the most horrible things.”

Meanwhile, he forgot about Harriet. For a while. He had fallen in love with Camille, and even got engaged to her. But then Camille’s mother, who didn’t cotton to the idea of her daughter’s marrying an impecunious composer,  informed Berlioz that Camille had gone and married a wealthy piano manufacturer.

Now, did I tell you that Berlioz was a little strange? Berlioz, now 29, decided to murder Camille, her mother, and the new husband. And then commit suicide. He would visit them in Camille’s home in Nice, disguised in a chambermaid’s dress. He was perfectly serious. He took two loaded double-barreled pistols and two bottles of laudanum and strychnine in his pockets (to kill himself, if a pistol didn’t work), and boarded a mail coach going to France.

 But…curses! He discovered that the dress he was planning to wear was gone! So, in despair, he threw himself into the sea…but was fished out. And at that point he decided…the hell with it.

Berlioz wrote his most famous work, the wonderful Symphonie fantastique, about this time, and it was performed in Paris. Guess who came to see it. Harriet Smithson herself! And the day after the concert he was finally—FINALLY—introduced to her! He wrote: “What an improbable romance life is!... Yes, I love her and am loved in return.”

  But Harriet was still a bit reluctant to marry Berlioz. So he did what every lover would do to persuade her. He took poison. And told her that only if she consented to marry him would he take the antidote. She consented, he took the antidote, and they were married. “She is mine, and I defy the world,” said Berlioz.

Harriet didn’t age well. Three years older than her husband, she was gaining weight, neglecting her appearance, and drinking a lot. Her career had foundered. She was also becoming crazily jealous. Well, not so crazily.

Berlioz had taken up with an opera singer named Marie Recio. As a singer, she was…not great. But she insisted on singing in all of his music performances.

Poor Harriet! She became unable to move or speak coherently, a living corpse. She required two nurses along with doctor visits every day. Still, Berlioz never stopped paying for her care. After she died, Berlioz married Marie. She died eight years later.

And then Berlioz took up with...Amelie, age 26. He had met her while visiting Marie’s grave – Amelie was also visiting a grave, and they began talking. He fought against it,  “but I was conquered by my loneliness and by the inexorable need for tenderness that was killing me.”

Still,  he was worried. “But I am 60! She cannot love me!” They broke off.  She died a year later—and he didn’t find out for six months.

Berlioz had been supporting himself by teaching and by writing about music. He was a fine critic. His book on orchestration remains a classic. His  commentaries on Beethoven, whom he worshipped, are still worth reading. But he hated writing about music.  He was also a superior conductor. He was even invited to conduct in New York City by American Steinway, but turned it down—he had become wealthy enough. I’m reminded of what George Szell said about Glenn Gould: “That nut is a genius!”

Berlioz spent the remainder of his life writing music—operas, a requiem—and touring. He made a trip to Russia—Balzac gave him a fur coat—where he was a big success. In fact, Berlioz became world famous. His father, who had bitterly opposed his becoming composer, was now proud of him and had Hector describe his accomplishments again and again. (But he never actually heard Berlioz’s music.)

        An amazing man, Berlioz preceded Fritz Kreisler by perpetrating a clever hoax, claiming that a piece he himself wrote was actually written by an old composer. Berlioz then quoted a critic as saying, “Berlioz could never do that.”

In his old age—and by old age, I mean his 60s—he decided to visit…Estelle. His first love.

Estelle’s husband had died. She had had six children. She lived with her four sons. She was in her 60s.

He wrote to her:  “You could not have known how you overwhelmed my childish heart….” And he tried to reassure her. “I shall know how to control myself.” Could he occasionally visit her, and write to her? And on and on. Blah blah blah.

And she answered him. She was flattered. Berlioz was so famous, she had just read a biography about him! But she was moving to Geneva to be with one of her sons. “Farewell, Monsieur Berlioz.  I am deeply grateful for the feelings you have preserved for me.”

He wrote her another long letter. “Oh! Madame, madame, I have but one aim left in the world—that of obtaining your affection.”

She wrote a long, sad reply. “I am but an old, a very old woman six years older than you; my heart is withered by days of anguish…which have left me without any illusions about the joys  of the world…. There are certain dreams and illusions that should be abadoned when we reach our white-haired years…. I shall always hear of your future triumphs with pleasure. Farewell monsieur.”

So, was she as beautiful in her late 60s as she had been as a teenager?

You decide.

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&sa=G&hl=en&q=hector+berlioz&tbm=isch&tbs=simg:CAQSkAEajQELEKjU2AQaBggDCAoIPQwLELCMpwgaYgpgCAMSKPUB9wT0AbQZ-AGeEsUCsxmdB9gOny6hLqAuxDqbLsI6wzrBOvUt9SQaMD4XC1CkWYlTapFLO1nmyOQbw9hmlPWQ0uygjNgAJfW6WfbS7Q4_1C9hpuv57topIpyADDAsQjq7-CBoKCggIARIE8iKOtww&ved=0ahUKEwiv0pDnmLnKAhUL62MKHWKZCpQQwg4IGigA&biw=1159&bih=706#imgrc=PwrW5L5AaX0_0M%3A

Berlioz lived a few more years, but it was a grim old age, lonely and sad and in pain. He wrote: “I am in my 61st year; past hopes, past illusions, past high thoughts and lofty conceptions…. My contempt for the folly and baseness of mankind, my hatred of its atrocious cruelty, have never been so intense. And I say hourly to Death: 'When you will'. Why does he delay?^””

He did not seek comfort in religion. “I believe in nothing,” he said.

After he died, he was buried in Montmartre Cemetary. His two ex-wives were exhumed and buried next to him.

At one time, he was numbered among the three B’s—Beethoven, Bach, and Berlioz. Eventually Brahms took his place.

And, sadly, his music was seldom popular in his native France. Thinking about his funeral, his last, dying words were said to be: “At last they are going to play my music.”