Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz was a composer of startling originality and one of the boldest pioneers in new orchestral sonorities. He was also one of the strongest proponents of using literature to create a musical narrative. In his Mémoires, Berlioz tells us how he learnt to play the flute and guitar in a provincial French town as a child, left for Paris, abandoned his medical studies, and enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire in 1826. Though critics would point to his unconventional training as a weakness, Berlioz's lack of rigid early schooling in the rules of harmony and counterpoint allowed him unprecedented imaginative freedom. With his romantic imagination fired by his encounters with Goethe, Beethoven, and Shakespeare, he won the conservatoire's prestigious Prix de Rome with his cantata La mort de Sardanapale in 1830, enjoying two years of study in the Italian city. By the time he left France, he had already written his Symphonie fantastique, the work that made him famous and marked him out as the most revolutionary and Romantic composer of his age. Without this seminal work, the tone poems of Richard Strauss and the symphonies of Mahler would not have been the same. For many, Berlioz’s astonishing orchestration is his crowning achievement, overlooking his gift for melody. Contemporary caricaturists liked to depict Berlioz as a pompous general presiding over a vast orchestral army of sounds. Undoubtedly he did call for grandiose effects in his later music, yet it is in Berlioz's subtlest writing that his individuality is most pronounced. He shows his tender and intimate side, too, in the choral nativity triptych L'enfance du Christ. Berlioz broadened the literary sources of his music with the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette and scenes from Goethe in La damnation de Faust, where the string harmonics above the melody were pioneering. His works were condemned as too modern by many of his contemporaries but were nonetheless sufficiently successful to allow him to eke out a living, which he supplemented by means of a second career as a critic. Berlioz proved his own operatic credentials early on with Benvenuto Cellini, its Roman carnival music also appearing in his most famous overture, Le carnaval romain. Despite occasional revivals, opera-goers today seem to prefer the two-part epic Les troyens, with the sublime melodies for Dido and Cassandre. Although denied automatic approval, he was rewarded with the friendship and support of the greatest composers of his day. It is for his gift of delicate beauty, however, alongside his sensational orchestration and the explosive force of his grander works, that Berlioz stands in the front rank of composers.