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Hector Berlioz: Paris Conservatoire
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Berlioz started going to the Opéra. He particularly liked the music of Gluck and went to the library to study Gluck’s scores. At the end of 1822 he found a good teacher. His name was Le Sueur. He made Berlioz stop publishing his music until he had learned to compose properly. In 1826 he was officially a student at the Conservatoire.
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Berlioz's penchant for the monumental is illustrated by two further Paris concerts given under his direction. The first in 1844 amassed 1,022 performers, including 36 double basses for Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, 24 French horns for Weber's Der Freischütz overture, and 25 harps for Rossini's Prayer of Moses. This was followed in 1855 by a spectacular, featuring 1,200 players, plus choruses and five sub-conductors.
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Berlioz got tired of being the second name cited in the oft mentioned "Wagner and Berlioz" together. He was especially irritated when he saw his old friend Liszt 'grooving' on Wagner. Was he not famous throughout Europe and beyond? Indeed he toured abroad and once attended a concert in Vienna where the ladies would wear cameo's with his face upon them, part of the enthusiastic crowds heard a 12th anniversery of his Faustin 1866. But, he would not give up the 'Hottentots,' as he called his Parisiennes, to become the Kappelmeister at the Imperial Chapel in Austria. He certainly was the picayune conductor, when, for example, the time an English horn players' mistake prompted Belioz to hurl his baton at the malingerer.
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When the Conservatoire examinations of 1827, came on, Hector tried again, and this time passed the preliminary test. The task set for the general competition was to write music for Orpheus torn by the Bacchantes. An incompetent pianist, whose duty it was to play over the compositions, for the judges, could seem to make nothing of Hector's score. The six judges, headed by Cherubini, the Director of the Conservatoire, voted against the aspirant, and he was thrown out a second time.
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Berlioz returned to Paris in 1832, where a concert of his works was given that included the Symphonie fantastique and Lélio. He met Harriett Smithson again; despite the opposition of his parents, he married her in 1833. The marriage was not a happy one. Harriett, no longer acting, became irritable and jealous and took to drinking.
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Apart from the many literary influences, Berlioz ... championed Beethoven who was at the time unknown in France. The performance of the 'Eroica' symphony in Paris seems to have been a turning point for Berlioz's compositions. Next to Beethoven, Berlioz worshipped Gluck, Weber and Spontini.
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