Ravinia Festival

The French composer Hector Berlioz was born on 11 December, 1803, in the little town of La Côte Saint-André, about 300 miles south of Paris. His father was a well educated doctor who taught his son the classics and brought him up to be a doctor like himself and to look after the family properties. The young Hector was drawn to music and learned both the flute and guitar, although there was no piano in the town and he never learned to play the piano. In due course he went to Paris as a medical student, but the musical riches of the capital, especially opera, drew him quickly away from medicine and he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire to study composition. Despite the opposition of his family and a constant shortage of money he managed to compose a Mass, an opera, and a group of smaller vocal works. In 1827 he discovered the poetry and plays of Shakespeare which were to inspire him to write a number of his major works. He read Goethe's Faust, which also inspired him. In 1830 he produced the Symphonie fantastique, a path-breaking symphony modeled on Beethoven, but also recounting a dramatic love-affair which had dominated his life for the previous two years.

In the same year he won the Prix de Rome, a competition run by the Conservatoire, whose winners received a five-year scholarship to study in Rome and Germany. He spent a year and a half in Rome, and although he composed little while he was there, he was much affected by Italian scenery and country life, and a number of his major works were to be set in Italy. He cut short his stay in Italy and went directly back to Paris, since Paris was the musical capital of the world at that time, especially in the fields of opera and piano music. Foreign composers like Rossini, Meyerbeer, Chopin and Liszt were living there, and although Berlioz contributed nothing to the world of the piano, he was very anxious to have an opera performed. He achieved this with Benvenuto Cellini, staged at the Opera in 1838. It was a daringly modern work and was soundly rejected by the Paris public. Berlioz found that he could be surer of a sympathetic audience in the concert hall and that his symphonies were more deeply appreciated. Harold en Italie was a symphony with solo viola (1834) and Romeo et Juliette (1839) was a large-scale symphony for soloists, chorus and orchestra. He also wrote a number of large choral works, chief of which is the Requiem, commissioned in 1837 and composed for an enormous orchestra and chorus, with four extra brass bands.

In 1833 he married Harriet Smithson, the Irish actress who had so bewitched him in the roles of Ophelia and Juliet in 1827; the Symphonie fantastique was a thinly veiled dramatization of his passion, at that time unrequited. They had a son, Louis, born in 1834. Berlioz made little money from giving concerts or from publishing his music, so he turned to journalism as a steady source of income, and for thirty years he wrote regular columns in the Parisian press. He never enjoyed this occupation, and it made him many enemies since his opinions were always strongly expressed. In due course, too, the public perceived him as a critic, rather than as a composer, which made acceptance of his music more and more problematic in Paris. When he presented his large choral work La Damnation de Faust in December 1846, he found that the public were barely interested in his new work. Disappointment at the cost of putting it on and the poor attendance at the performances drove him to spend more and more time abroad and to give concerts in Germany, Russia and England rather than in France.

His first trip abroad had been in 1842-43 when he toured Belgium and Germany and discovered that his music was deeply appreciated there. In 1845 he went further afield to Vienna, Prague and Pest; in 1847 he traveled to St Petersburg and Moscow, and in 1848 he spent many months in London. On these tours he conducted his own music, and he began to be recognized as a virtuoso conductor, much in demand for his authoritative skills on the podium. In 1844 he published a treatise on the art of orchestration, one of the first books of its kind, which consolidated his reputation as a brilliant master of this craft. In 1856 he also wrote a short borchure on the art of conducting, which provided guidelines for conducting still in general use today.

The calls of journalism and foreign tours diminished his activity as a composer. In 1849 he wrote a choral Te Deum, largely put together from earlier music. There was then a gap until 1854, when the little oratorio L'Enfance du Christ, about the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, was put on in Paris. This was an unexpected success, and it encouraged him to embark on the biggest undertaking of his career, the grand opera Les Troyens, based on Virgil's account of the fall of the city of Troy and the great passion of Dido and Aeneas. This was completed in 1858, but he was never to hear more than a part of it performed in his lifetime. His last work was a comic opera based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, written for the German spa at Baden-Baden and performed in 1862.

Berlioz was a man of intense passion who believed profoundly in the expressive power of music to match words, poetry, and personal experience. Most of his music is based on the great dramatists and poets that inspired him, and he wrote no "pure" sonatas or symphonies of an abstract kind. His life, too, was lived with passionate conviction, as we can tell from reading his Memoirs. But his career was tragic at many levels. His first marriage eventually failed, and when Harriet Smithson died in 1854 he married again, this time a singer. His last years were clouded by illness and disappointment, and his son, an officer in the Merchant Marine, died aged 33 in 1867. This was a terrible blow, which he sought to alleviate by traveling to Russia to give more concerts. But his strength was failing, and he died in Paris on March 8, 1869, at the age of 65.

Sources:

Berlioz, Memoirs, trans. David Cairns, New York, 1975 (and later edns) David Cairns, Berlioz, 2 vols, London: Penguin, 1999. Peter Bloom, The Life of Berlioz, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hugh Macdonald, Berlioz, Oxford University Press, 2000.


	One Score - One Chicago - Ravinia's U.'s interactive exploration of Symphonie Fantastique. Click here to learn more!

Ravinia Festival 2003 has created a compelling mix of time-honored classics with provocative, exciting new work! Click here for special Season Highlights!