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Hector Berlioz: Operas
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Creatively, Berlioz continued despite howls of derision and produced the masterly La Damnation de Faust in 1846, a near operatic treatment woven with symphonic gravitas. He called it a "dramatic legend". His magisterial Te Deum premiered in 1849 with 1,000 performers, including a chorus of 600 children.
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When the boys reached Paris, in 1822, Hector loyally tried to keep his promise to his father and threw himself into the studies which were so repugnant to him. He says he might have become a common-place physician after all, had he not one night gone to the opera. That night was a revelation; he became half frantic with excitement and enthusiasm. He went again and again. Learning that the Conservatoire library, with its wealth of scores, was open to the public, he began to study the scores of his adored Gluck. He read, re-read and copied long parts and scenes from these wonderful scores, even forgetting to eat, drink or sleep, in his wild enthusiasm.
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The son of a beloved country physician, Berlioz was sent to Paris to study medicine but abandoned this idea after investigating, simultaneously, the city morgue and the Opera. His brand of Romanticism—and his future wife, the actress Harriet Smithson—were discovered in 1827 at performances of Shakespeare by an English theater troupe. The next year he learned the symphonies of Beethoven at concerts by the new Paris Conservatory Orchestra. All this culminated in his first symphony, the Symphonie fantastique (1830).
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Berlioz was born in France at La Côte-Saint-André in the département of Isère, between Lyon and Grenoble. His father was a physician, and young Hector was sent to Paris to study medicine at the age of eighteen. Berlioz was horrified by the process of dissection, and, despite his father's disapproval, he abandoned his career path in medicine to study music a year later. He then attended the Paris Conservatoire, studying opera and composition.
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In 1835 Berlioz started a side career, (while still composing) that lasted 20 years: musical criticism, and like Schumann, could make or break you, writing in Journal des Débats. His Juges was getting praise in Leipzig, and while Schumann's opinions were favorable, Mendelssohn was rather unkind calling parts of the music "...screeching...March cats." But during this part of Hector's creativity he produced two memorable pieces, Harold in Italy and his favorite, Messe des Morts (or Requiem). But, he wanted to write the great opera.
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If the image of Beethoven was still vivid in Berlioz’s mind at this time, his primary concern, for professional as well as artistic reasons, was to win success at the Opéra. Only ... was real recognition to be sought; only thus, too, could Berlioz prove himself in the noble line of Gluck and Spontini. Les francs-juges had already been revised once before he left for Italy. After his return he made a further attempt, with Thomas Gounet’s help, to refashion it into a single act, but it still aroused no interest. After abandoning it, he considered a comic opera on Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (this eventually materialized as Béatrice et Bénédictin 1862) and briefly contemplated Hamlet before persuading Léon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier, with Alfred de Vigny’s assistance, to make a libretto out of Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita (Memoirs), a book whose abundant incident appealed strongly to him. It provided, too, the irresistible local colour of Renaissance Italy.
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