(La Côte-Saint-André, 11 December 1803 - Paris, 8 March 1869)
The son of a doctor was so musically gifted that he wrote his first compositions at twelve. He went to Paris in 1822, whereby his father's will, he should have followed his medical studies; he devoted himself entirely to music, perfecting himself from 1826 to '28 with Reicha and Lesueur at the Conservatory.
In 1831 he was in Rome, where he met Mendelssohn and perhaps Glinka, and in 1832 he was again in Paris, where he had to fight against financial hardship and family misfortunes. He then began his critical activity, and from 1835 to 1963, he wrote for the "Journal cles débats"; meanwhile, he organized concerts of his own music and was noticed by Paganini.
In 1838 he entered the Conservatory as vice-librarian, and in 1839 he experienced his first undisputed success with the public with Roméo et Juliette.
In 1854, when his first wife died, he remarried a singer, and with her, he continued his tours, which had already begun in 1843, in all the countries of Europe as an acclaimed and disputed conductor. But his compositions in Paris still did not meet a stable favor, while his affectionate friend Liszt came to organize a "Berlioz Festival" for him in Weimar in 1855.
He is again haunted by family misfortunes in recent years: his affectionate sister and second wife die, and in 1968 his dear friend Humbert Ferrand passes away. Thus, the compositional activity is also attenuated, just as his genius finally begins to be recognized in France and abroad. In 1867-68 he went to Russia (where he had already been in 1847), and once again, he is welcomed triumphantly: but his fiber is undermined by fatigue and pain, and three months after his return, he dies in a lethargic sleep.
Multiform genius, literate man as well as a born musician, original temperament if not bizarre, passionate and whimsical like few others, combative and optimistic but also prone to sudden, sudden psychic collapses, Berlioz is one of the most picturesque figures and also one of the most talented admirable that he had the music. His contemporaries judged him in the most diverse and contrasting ways: Mendelssohn, Saint-Saens, and others still denied that he had any value as a creator; Schumann, Heine, and Liszt, on the other hand, praised him as a true genius, and some even claimed that he was the most outstanding musician ever.
This disparity of judgments actually finds its justification in Berlioz's music. A born symphonist, he is linked on the one hand to Beethoven. He retains the taste of the classical school, the imperious need for thematic development, of symphonic breath in the broadest sense. However, his heated imagination, the inconstancy of his personality, and his solid literary taste led him to considerably correct this approach. He shakes the symphonic form with the intense violence of ideas, plumps it up, and revives it through the programmatic need, which was alive in him as in few other musicians and even indicates him as the initiator of a trend that will culminate in the form of the symphonic poem. However, he remains a non-descriptive musician. His being firmly rooted in the best classical tradition gives his production an expressive substance that draws considerable heights in the happiest pages. His inspiration remains unequal, and he can, as suddenly as unexpectedly, go from episodes of great lyrical or dramatic effusion to moments of banality that it was understandable to make a refined and balanced composer like Mendelssohn turn up his nose (whom he defined as "incredibly disgusting" Fantastic symphony).
To give the worthy musical dress to the parts of his imagination, Berlioz induced himself to expand, enrich, and, in short, revolutionize the orchestra, studying the most peculiar characteristics of every single instrument to exploit them at the service of his ideas: he was thus the first "instrumentalist" in the virtuosic and modern sense of the term, the direct predecessor of Rimski and Strauss and of all the descriptive and coloristic symphonic of the late nineteenth century. He snatches the instruments' most unusual and unsuspected sounds, forces them to sing in unusual distinctive, and pushes them to technical evolutions unimaginable. Not only that, but it introduces little-used instruments, the legacy of bands or certain particular orchestral formations (such as the piccolo clarinet, bells, flute horns, and the alto flute), occasionally doubling or multiplying the sections of horns, brass, and percussion, introduces and creates ex nova a series of new balances between the various parts of the orchestra, giving life to a complex of works that for decades will become irreplaceable texts for the study of instrumentation (after all, he systematized his science as an orchestrator in a treatise still very valuable today). To give an idea of the singularity of his personality as a musician, we mention the ensemble of the "Tuba Mirum" of the Requiem: there are about 60 wind instruments (including 8 bassoons, 8 horns, and 16 trombones), 16 timpani, and an overwhelming quantity of string instruments, including 18 double basses.
In addition to several plays and a large amount of vocal music (primarily for choir and for solos and orchestra), Berlioz left 6 overtures, pieces for solo instrument and orchestra, and the famous Fantastic Symphony, the archetype of all modern program music.
Composed at the age of 27, this Symphony, which has as its subtitle "Episodes from the life of an artist" and is dedicated to Tsar Nicholas I, definitely pushed its author into the international musical limelight. It was born as a passionate outburst of deep pain that the artist had given the blonde actress Harriett Smithson, his future wife. Without realizing it, Berlioz gave life to the first known example of program music, the prototype of so much of the symphony. Nineteenth-century, in particular, of the "symphonic poems" of later authors. By pouring his passion into this imposing score, Berlioz drew up an actual program, attributing specific narrative content to each piece of the composition. Despite everything, however, we are from the formal point of view in the symphony field. Berlioz's model is still Beethoven here: compared to the scheme of the classical symphony, there is, in fact, only the addition of a piece, while the arrangement of the times remains more or less still the one established by Viennese classicism.
The ensemble, without departing excessively from that of the great Beethoven orchestra, presents some novelties: among other things, the piccolo clarinet (which appears here probably for the first time in the symphony orchestra), two tubas, bells, four timpani, and one dense array of arches (at least 60 in all). And here is the "program" of the piece: a young musician, poisoned for love with opium, falls into a deep sleep, where his sensations and memories of him are translated into musical images. His beloved one turns into a melody, which returns continuously during the Symphony: it is the famous "idée fixe" of the Symphony.
In the first half - entitled "Dreams, passions" and consisting of an introductory 'Largo' and an 'Allegro agitated, and very passionate' - the young man recalls the situation of his soul before and after having met his beloved woman with her melancholy and then with the delirious anguish and the furors of jealousy.
The second half is "Un ballo" (waltz): the protagonist meets his beloved during a brilliant party, during a dance.
The third part is a "Country scene" ('Adagio'): a lovely pastoral atmosphere calms the exacerbated soul of the young man, interrupted only for a moment by the appearance of his beloved, who awakens in her heart the most desperate apprehensions of she.
And here is the "March to the torture" ('Allegretto non too'): the young man dreams of having killed his beloved, of being sentenced to death and led to torture. The passage describes the dismal and solemn procession, and at the end, the beloved reappears for a moment in a short vision.
The last movement is entitled "A night's dream of the Sabbath" ('Larghetto-Allegro'). The lover finds himself amid a crowd of shadows and sorcerers; the "idée fixe" reappears, now in the guise of a trivial and grotesque dance (note the parodic use of the piccolo clarinet): it is the beloved who comes to the Sabbath, mingling with the orgy. The bells toll dead, parodying the Dies Irae, and the Sabbath ends with a hellish jumble.
After reading this program, the listener can also easily forget it: the richness of the music, the variety of atmospheres, the genius of certain melodic and timbral intuitions, and the solidity of the formal structure are such that the Fantastic Symphony remains a piece of pure music. , turgid and expressive like few other pages by the great French composer.
