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Hector Berlioz
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Hector Berlioz was considered to be the father of French Romanticism in music. His music was always extremely original and grand in scale. As a result of his extreme ideas, he was often viewed as a crazy lunatic by many of his contemporaries. Fortunately, many of his great works survived. These days, some of his most famous works, including Symphonie Fantastique, The Damnation of Faust, and The Requiem, are periodically performed in concert halls.
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French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz was an habitual opium user. He is most famous for his orchestral work Symphonie fantastique. Symphonie fantastique is an "opera without words". It was first performed in 1830. Each movement is designed to evoke the different stages of the opium experience. A sublimation of his own unrequited love for actress Harriet Smithson, Berlioz's masterpiece is about a tormented lovesick artist who takes an overdose of opium. Instead of killing him, the opium induces astonishing dream imagery.
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From an early age Hector Berlioz had a driving hope that reality could please deeply and thrill a person electrically. "Happiness on a grand scale," he wrote in a letter of 1831--"poetical life or annihilation!" Biographer W.J. Turner tells of how, as a teenager, he was an enthusiast for the poetry of Virgil and la Fontaine, for the beautiful landscape of the province of Dauphine in southern France, where he grew up, and for Napoleon. He studied flute and guitar--tender instruments both--but had a special affection for playing the drums. Arriving in Paris in 1821 as a medical student--his father was a doctor--the dissecting room horrified him, and soon Berlioz had thrown himself, heart and soul, into the study of musical composition, enrolling, in 1826, in the Conservatoire.
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Hector Berlioz: Harold En Italie - Viola And Piano Composed by Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), edited by Hugh MacDonald, Paul Banks. For viola and piano. Urtext of the New Berlioz Edition. Format: set of performance parts (includes separate pull-out viola part). With solo part, piano reduction and introductory text. Romantic Period.
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When Hector Berlioz first saw Harriet Smithson in 1827, the Irish actress was in Paris with an English acting company. She performed the roles of Ophelia and Juliet and it seems the effect of these performances was electric. For days afterwards all Berlioz could speak of was Shakespeare and Harriet Smithson.
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Hector Berlioz was born in La Cate-St-Andre, Isere in 1803. Berlioz died on March 8th 1869 in Paris. Berlioz died possibly because he was heart broken about the failure of his opera Les Troyens.
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Hector Berlioz