Hector Berlioz
A Romantic Tragedy

Written for and dedicated to
the
RADIO MEMBERS
of
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK

Copyright 1949
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK
113 West 57th Street
New York 19, N. Y.

1865—Berlioz—Theme from the beginning of the Fantastique Symphony

FOREWORD

A thumbnail sketch like the present is, of course, the last place in the world to recount even an infinitesimal part of a life so vivid and crowded with bitter conflict and tragic experience as that of Hector Berlioz; and the person who attempts it is beaten in advance. Moreover, such an effort seems almost gratuitous. For Berlioz has told his own story better than anyone else could possibly do it. When Ernest Newman was asked at one time to write a new biography of the epoch-making composer he informed the publisher who suggested it that “no Life by any other hands will ever be able to bear comparison as a piece of literature with Berlioz’ Autobiography. All others are for the most part a watering down into the author’s inferior style of the sparkling prose of Berlioz himself”. How much more futile is it to attempt on the minuscule scale of the following tiny, if rambling, pamphlet to touch upon even a thousandth of those achievements and unremitting conflicts which entered into the texture of this master’s agitated and inharmonious life! Actually, it aims to do no more than contribute a mite toward a larger interest in the writings and the great mass of insufficiently discovered compositions of a Romanticist whose labors are still surprisingly unrecognized art works of the future.

H. F. P.

HECTOR BERLIOZ
A Romantic Tragedy

By
HERBERT F. PEYSER

“No doubt I deserve to go to Hell”, said Berlioz once to a friend who had reproached him for his treatment of Henrietta Smithson, his first wife; “but what would you have? I am in Hell already!”

It was not an exaggeration or a figure of speech. Berlioz was in hell the greater part of his life. Of all the great composers he was perhaps the most consistently wretched. Misery and frustration pursued him from his youth to his grave. Time and again his existence seemed like the fulfillment of a curse. Actually, his mother had called one down upon him at the very beginning of his career and for the rest of his days it appeared to work itself out implacably. One might even believe the malediction had retained its power beyond the tomb. For the posthumous glory of Berlioz is by no means unchallenged. Almost alone among the masters he does not command anything like universal admiration, let alone affection. He has his redoubtable champions and they include many of the greatest musicians, living and dead. But where Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner need no defense Berlioz incontestably does. Rightly or wrongly he continues to be a problem, with all that this condition implies. Yet without him music could not conceivably be just what it is. And perhaps the strangest aspect of the paradox is that only a limited portion of his output enjoys anything like what might be called frequent hearing. The greater part of his greatest works remains to all intents, undiscovered—nay, unsuspected—by the multitude.

The little mountain town, La Côte-Saint-André, where Louis-Hector Berlioz was born on December 11, 1803, had briefly been called La Côte-Bonne-Eau during the Revolution and the Reign of Terror when “saints”, for a while, went out of fashion. It was not far from Grenoble on one side or from Lyon on another. The Berlioz family originated in Savoie and can be traced back to the sixteenth century. Hector’s father, Louis Berlioz, a doctor and a property owner, had at one time been mayor of La Côte-Saint-André. In 1802 he had married Marie-Antoinette-Joséphine Marmion, a good-looking woman, religious to the point of bigotry. Hector was the oldest of six children, two of whom died at an early age. The surviving daughters, Nanci and Adèle, were followed as late as 1820 by a son, Prosper, a “problem child” in the truest sense of the term, vague and unmanageable up to the time of a belated adolescence, then developing into a mathematical genius and dying in his twentieth year before people had ceased to marvel at his talents.

Hector’s father supervised his early education, though it was probably as a concession to his wife that he placed the youngster in the local Catholic Seminary. The boy did not stay there long even if his mother harbored ambitions of making a saint of him. For a time he went uncomplainingly to mass, communion, confession and the rest. In his Memoirs Hector tells us details of his weekly “confessions” when he would say to the “director” of his conscience “My father, I have done nothing” and that worthy would reply “Go on, my child, as you have begun”. And so he did—for several years, at least.

Yet his mother’s religiosity was to have the effect of turning Hector’s thoughts away from the church and toward the great figures of classical mythology. He “felt his heart throb and his voice quiver and break” when he construed the fourth book of Virgil’s “Aeneid” to his father; and when the good man tactfully cut the lesson short Hector was “intensely grateful to him for taking no notice of my emotion and rushed away to vent my Virgilian grief in solitude”. Mythology was not the only love with which his father filled him; under the paternal guidance he developed an interest in geography and stories of travel helped fire his imagination.

Birthplace—La Côte-Saint-André

From an early age Hector had shown a sensitiveness to musical impressions and, besides learning to sing at sight, acquired some proficiency in playing the flute and the flageolet—though “I was twelve before the magic of music was revealed to me”. Presently he added to his musical accomplishments the playing of the guitar. The piano he never, apparently, undertook to master. But in later years he made a virtue of necessity and insisted he was glad to compose “silently and freely” without having to depend on the keyboard. With harmony it was rather different and after an unsuccessful start with Rameau’s treatise on the subject, even in a simplified form, he had recourse to a text book by Catel in order to pick up some elementary principles. These he presently put to use in a “six part potpourri on a collection of Italian airs” and in the composition of a couple of quintets for flute and strings. The first was played by some local amateurs and aroused the enthusiasm of all the hearers except Hector’s father. Dr. Berlioz preferred as much of the later quintet as his son was able to play him on the flute, but the piece being much more difficult, the amateur executants who tried it quickly suffered shipwreck. The composer eventually burned both scores yet salvaged a theme his father had liked