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HECTOR BERLIOZ.

1803-1869.

I.

BERLIOZ THE MAN.

THE 11th of December, 1903, will mark the centenary of that remarkable personality and mercurial musical genius, Hector Berlioz. In the whole range of musical biography it would be hard to cite another career so fraught with difficulties and embittering failures as was this musician's life from beginning to end. If Shakespeare and he had been born in the same era, we can imagine the dramatist eagerly scenting him out, and developing a magnificent tragedy from a subject ready-made, as it were, for essentially Shakespearian treatment. It must be confessed that many, if not all, Berlioz's vicissitudes were distinctly of his own making. He was possessed not so much of quiet, dogged perseverance, as of a certain ferocious energy, which, while it goaded him on to Titanic achievements, was intensely exhausting both to himself and all about him, and did not fail to bring with it an inevitable reaction of discouragement and prostration. Nothing that happened to Berlioz ever seemed the result of a calm and gradual unfolding of Nature and circumstance. His story can remind us of a series of lightning flashes zig-zagging one rift after another athwart some dense, black thundercloud. It is perhaps hardly too fanciful to regard him as the outcome of one of the last convulsive throes of that great upheaval and revolution through which his country bad so recently been passing.

A vivid contrast to the mental world of ceaseless agitation and emotional tension in which his peculiar temperament condemned him to dwell, was the physical aspect of the peaceful nook in which he was born. This was the Côte Saint André, in the midst of one of the most romantic and spacious regions of France, close to the picturesque old town of Grenoble, with its steep buttressed approaches, and its grove's of pomegranate and oleander, clashing in the brilliance of their gorgeous flame-coloured and carmine flowers. Judging from Berlioz's descriptions, the place has changed but little in a century. In these quiet surroundings he spent the first nineteen years of his life, receiving a desultory home education from his father, who was the doctor of the district, and a man much respected throughout the countryside. Of

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anything approaching a musical atmosphere, the boy's childhood was devoid, but an old French air which he heard sung when he was about eight or nine, gave what he characteristically termed the first "magnetic shock" to his dormant musical sensibility. By the time that he was twelve he had contrived to acquire the rudiments of a somewhat unusual combination of instruments, namely, the flageolet, the flute, and the guitar, and he could sing at sight what little vocal music came in his way. He had, moreover, made his first attempts at composition. These must have been very curious. With nothing but his instinct to guide him he wrote concerted music for his three instruments, throwing in an extra part for the violin. Various local amateurs were unanimous in declaring these works to be absolutely hideous and impossible of execution, and it may be that they were not far wrong in their estimate!

Berlioz seems very early to have had a strange divination as to the capacities of an orchestra. He had never heard one, nor seen an orchestral score, when he one day came across a sheet of paper ruled with twenty-four staves. The sight of it had an irresistible fascination for him; and as he stared at the magic lines he repeated, "Quelle superbe musique on doit pouvoir écrire là-dessus." The only serious musical instruction which be ever received was a few lessons in theory taken when he was already twenty. Thus his musical equipment, as far as external training went, was certainly meagre. His father intended him to follow his own profession, and in 1822 he despatched him to Paris to go through a course of medical and surgical training. "I was doubtless," wrote the young man, "on my way towards adding another unit to the disastrous number of bad doctors, when I chanced one night to visit the opera. The work given was the Danaïdes of Salieri. The performance put me into an indescribable state of excitement. I was like a boy with a sailor's instincts, who, never having seen a larger vessel than a little skiff darting across a lake, suddenly perceives before his gaze a majestic three-decker sailing proudly on the broad ocean."

Shortly after this revelation he visited the free musical library of the Conservatoire, and there found the scores of Gluck. These roused in him a frenzy of enthusiasm. He could neither eat nor sleep; day after day the dissecting room was neglected, and he spent his time learning the Iphigénie en Tauride by heart. He naturally did not hesitate to implore his parents to allow him to abandon medicine for music, and his frantic letters producing no effect, he journeyed home in order to prosecute his personal entreaties. But all his arguments proved fruitless. His mother, to whom he appealed to intercede for him with his father, was a

fervent and extremely narrow-minded Catholic, to whom an artist's profession represented the speediest road to eternal perdition. After begging him on her knees in vain to refrain, she solemnly cursed him: an episode which inclines one to think that her son doubtless inherited a good deal of his highly-wrought, turbulent disposition from the maternal side. His father also remained inexorable, not from any religious scruples thoughhe was to all intents and purposes a sceptic-but simply because he was convinced that his son would never rise above mediocrity in music, and to Berlioz père mediocrity in any form was a heinous crime. Eventually Berlioz went his own way, and embarked upon his new profession, followed by his mother's curse, and without his father's blessing-and minus, moreover, the £5 a month hitherto allowed him for his subsistence.

Then ensued a grim struggle for existence. He often reduced the cost of his food to about fivepence per diem, and acquired rigorous habits of strict economy in his everyday needs, which clung to him for the rest of his life, albeit where his art was concerned he would be lavishly extravagant. He supported himself by giving flute and guitar lessons at a franc the hour, and even after he had composed two such works as the Franc-Juges overture and the Symphonie Fantastique, he was still thankful to earn a pittance by teaching the guitar in a young ladies' school. Long after these instruments had ceased to be of any use to him, he was once making a tour through Russia, conducting his own works. In Moscow it was then the rule that every artist who obtained the privilege of a hearing at the most important musical union of the city, must perform a solo of some kind.

"But I cannot," exclaimed poor Berlioz, "I am not a virtuoso, I am a composer and conductor. The orchestra is the instrument upon which I play." The Moscow musical authorities were much exercised. "Our rule has never yet been broken," they repeated. "It is impossible for you to give a concert here without yourself performing a solo." a solo." "Mon dieu," cried Berlioz, in desperation, some twenty-five years back I believe I played the flageolet, the flute, and the guitar fairly well. I have most likely forgotten them completely now. Still, if you insist, I will do my best with any one of these instruments, though I warn you I shall probably play them very badly." Fortunately, a friendly tchinòvnik intervened, and, thanks to his influence, the greatest conductor and concert composer then living was absolved from giving either a flageolet or a guitar solo. Still, his inability to perform upon anything but an orchestra considerably lowered him in the opinion of the Muscovites.

In his early days Berlioz was also glad to make use of his vocal

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powers. He was wont to relate with high glee, how, when he first went to Paris, he once competed successfully with a weaver, a blacksmith, and several other artisans and shopkeepers for a place in the chorus of a very second-rate Parisian vaudeville theatre, where, in return for his nightly services, he received a salary of £2 a month.

His one haven of refuge and consolation during this period was the afore-mentioned free library of the Conservatoire, where he rapidly acquired an extraordinary knowledge of pretty well all the music then in existence; and by such leaps and bounds did his own mastery of composition advance, that before he had been in Paris two years he had had a Mass performed at St. Roch, a church widely famed for the excellence of its musical performances. He could never have achieved this, but for the kindness of a young amateur who offered him the loan of £60 to pay the necessary expenses of production. To his dying day Berlioz looked back with heartfelt gratitude to this aid, which enabled him, as he said, to put "his foot in the stirrup." The Mass, which he subsequently burnt, was not only his first public venture as a composer, but also his first appearance as a conductor.

To any one who has come across the Parisian Charivari lampoons and caricatures of the 'forties of the nineteenth century, Berlioz's physiognomy cannot fail to be familiar. His tall, lean body, full of nervous movement, and his cadaverous face, with its huge, beak-like nose, its thin, sarcastic lips, and gleaming eyes surmounted by a shock of unruly hair, soon became a favourite target for ridicule; and where abuse was concerned, he certainly did not suffer from a dearth of advertisement. By the time that he was forty, he had succeeded, first, with what can only be termed ludicrous difficulty, in passing the various stereotyped and conventional examinations in musical composition at the Académie des Beaux Arts, and had finally carried off the great award of that institution, the Prix de Rome; second, he had married an invalid wife, encumbered with a heavy load of debts for which he made himself responsible, his own financial resources, for the moment, consisting of £12 borrowed from a friend; third, he had composed some of his finest works, which he had forced the Parisians to listen to, if not to applaud; fourth, he had made innumerable enemies, and a few staunch friends, amongst them Paganini, who on one occasion insisted on presenting him with £1,000, that he might pay his debts and have a little leisure to devote himself solely to composition—he had, moreover, become widely known, if not exactly popular, by his witty and stinging literary comments upon music and musicians. And, last of all, he had become

reconciled to his parents. After the Prix de Rome (a distinction of which Berlioz was in his heart of hearts ashamed), his father was ready to grant that perhaps after all his son had not quite missed his vocation. Rumours of his fame continued to find their way to the Côte St. André, but neither of his parents, strange to say, ever heard a note of his compositions.

II.

BERLIOZ THE WRITER.

Berlioz's artistic life spread over a period of nearly fifty years, and was a dual one divided between literature and music. His literary work is in its way quite as individual as are his compositions, and from a practical standpoint he found writing more lucrative than composing, for although his talent as a critic does not appear to have ever brought him in more than £200 a year, at any rate, it entailed no heavy financial loss, which was usually the case when the production of his music was at issue. The beginning of his career as a critic was almost identical with his early visits to the Paris Opera. It did not take him long to discover that the operas given were continually being tampered with, to suit the taste of the conductor, or the deficiencies of his orchestra, if not the caprices of the prima donna; and he did not hesitate to pounce upon these lapses, shouting in stentorian tones: "Who has dared to improve upon Gluck? There should be a phrase for two flutes there! The idiot! He is leaving out the violin theme!" and so on. His presence soon became a source of terror and dismay to both management and performers, especially as Berlioz speedily gathered round him a little circle of neophytes, whom he encouraged to add their clamourings to his own. And with triumph and delight they noticed that the various errors alluded to so obstreperously were usually remedied at the next performance. Gradually Berlioz replaced these unpremeditated spoken criticisms by feuilletons in the different Parisian papers. He had a wonderfully quick perception for those inner shades of mind and spirit which constitute the distinctiveness of personality, and he would focus in a few terse lines the salient features of a character or a work. This is very noticeable in his open letters to his contemporaries. For instance, he begins an epistle to Heine as follows:

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Come, for once we will wander in no prickly ways, where the dead blossoms of the wormwood and the nightshade peep from under beds of stinging nettles; where vipers and toads hiss and croak; where the waters of the lake seethe, and the earth trembles; where the evening breeze scorches, and ominous lightnings flash from the sunset clouds. What's the good of everlastingly biting one's lip, and darting forth venom from under half closed eyelids. For once let every thought of bitterness be far from

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