Louis-Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy. His three operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of hybrid genres.
About Hector Berlioz in brief
Louis-Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem and L’Enfance du Christ. His three operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of hybrid genres such as Roméo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust. At the age of twenty-four he fell in love with the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, and he pursued her obsessively until she finally accepted him seven years later. His independence of mind and refusal to follow traditional rules and formulas put him at odds with the conservative musical establishment of Paris. He briefly moderated his style sufficiently to win France’s premier music prize – the Prix de Rome – in 1830, but he learned little from the academics of the Paris Conservatoire. Opinion was divided for many years between those who thought him an original genius and those who viewed his music as lacking in form and coherence. He was highly regarded in Germany, Britain and Russia both as a composer and as a conductor. He wrote musical journalism throughout much of his career; some of it has been preserved in book form, including his Treatise on Instrumentation, which was influential in the 19th and 20th centuries. He died in Paris at the aged of 65, and is buried in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, near Paris, with his wife, Marie-Antoinette Joséphine, née Marmion, and their two daughters Nanci and Adèle.
He never studied the keyboard, and throughout his life played haltingly. He later contended that this was an advantage because it saved him from the tyranny of keyboard habits, so dangerous to thought and harmonies. The object of his affections was an eighteen-year-old neighbour, Estelle Dubœuf, who was teased for what was seen as a boyish crush, but endured all his early passion for his early love for Estelle. His last opera, Bé atrice et béné dict, based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, was a success at its premiere but did not enter the regular operatic repertoire. The second, the huge epic Les Troyen, was so large in scale that it was never staged in its entirety during his lifetime. His parents had five more children, three of whom died in infancy, and his surviving daughters remained close to Berioz throughout their lives. His father was a respected local figure, a progressively-minded doctor credited as the first European to practise and write about acupuncture. His wife was a strict Roman Catholic of less flexible views; his father was an agnostic with a liberal outlook; his wife was the strict Catholic of more flexible views. The elder son of a provincial doctor, he was expected to follow his father into medicine, and attended a Parisian medical college before taking up music as a profession.
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