Conservatoire, with a cantata in which there were many blunders in
harmony, but a good deal of dramatic power also, and on the strength
of it became his pupil. He studied the scores of Gluck's operas in the
Conservatoire library. With characteristic audacity he proposed to the
aged Andrieux, lecturer on literature in the school of medicine, that
he should write for him an opera libretto, but received a courteous
refusal. He did not hesitate to borrow twelve hundred francs from a
friend as a means of producing at the church of Saint-Roch a mass he
had written. And all this time he was raising obstacles for himself by
his enthusiastic impulsiveness and his utter lack of tact and worldly
discretion. The story of his first meeting with Cherubini, a man of
far-reaching influence as the director of the Conservatoire, will
serve as an example. Cherubini, who was a cold and formal precisian,
had made a strict ruling that the male and female readers at the
Conservatoire library should enter by different doors. Berlioz "did not
see the notice," entered by the women's door, and immediately buried
himself in the score of "Alceste." Presently he was recalled to this
world by finding Cherubini standing beside him, "a thin, cadaverous
figure with a pale face, tumbled hair, and fierce, gleaming eyes." Then
arose an angry altercation, ended by the director's ordering the porter
to eject the offending student, and a lively chase among the desks.
Berlioz, reaching the door, only stopped to announce to the enraged
Cherubini that he was "soon coming back to study Gluck again." He did
so; but he never conciliated the ill-will of his powerful enemy, who
from that day lost no opportunity to frustrate his ambitions.
It was indeed his failure to win one of the Conservatoire prizes,
which lost for him the countenance of his parents and plunged him into
many misfortunes. His mother at this time threw him off entirely,
in anger for which there was much justification; his father, more
patient, allowed him a period of probation, after which, if he could
not show himself a successful musician, he was to return to the study
of medicine. Thus put upon his mettle, he rented a closet of a room up
five flights of stairs, lived on bread, raisins, prunes, and dates, and
eked out his allowance by taking pupils on the guitar and the flute,
and in solfeggio. In this way he even managed to pay half of his debt
to the friend who had helped him produce his mass. But alas! this man,
as careless and devoid of tact as Berlioz himself, then wrote to the
father the story of the loan, requesting a payment in full. Who can
wonder that Dr. Berlioz, his toleration at last exhausted, upon paying
the balance of the debt cut off entirely the allowance? Not even then,
however, would Berlioz accept defeat, but, getting a post as chorus
singer in one of the small theatres, continued the struggle to attain
the prize on which so much depended. Could he but gain the _Prix de
Rome_, he would be assured an annuity of three thousand francs for five
years, the first two to be spent in the French Academy at Rome, the
third in Germany, and the last two at home: he would be free to study
and compose at leisure, he could show the world and his parents what
was in him.
The subject prescribed for the competition in 1826 was the death of
Orpheus, on which he proceeded to wreak himself with an ardor we can
well imagine. The result was that his bacchanal scene was pronounced
unplayable by the mediocre pianist provided to play the pieces to
the jury. Berlioz was furious--and most of all, characteristically,
at the injustice done his orchestration. "The piano," he cries, "at
once reduces all composers to the same level, and places the clever,
profound, ingenious instrumentalist on the same platform with the
ignorant dunce who knows nothing of this branch of his art. The piano
is a guillotine, and severs the head of noble or of churl with the same
impartial indifference." As the time of the next trial approached,
Berlioz with his usual impolitic frankness made such a nuisance of
himself, by criticising in a loud voice, from the pit of the opera
house, the liberties taken with the scores of the great masters,
that he was debarred altogether by the scandalized authorities. In
1828, missing the first prize by two votes, one of them Cherubini's,
he obtained the second prize, consisting of a laurel wreath, a not
very valuable gold medal, and a free pass to the opera-house. Still
invincible, he prepared himself to storm once more the pedantry of the
judges; he did his best, but, in the words of Boïeldieu, "they found
his best too good," and in 1829 the prize was not awarded at all. It
was not until 1830 that, at last learning by experience, he wrote his
cantata of "Sardanapalus" in the dryest and most conservative style he
could compass, leaving out altogether the conflagration scene, which
might have proved unplayable, and at any rate would have disturbed
the tranquillity of the judges. Discretion won the day; the prize was
awarded him, and he was free to depart for Rome, and to finish his
cantata to his own satisfaction, which we may be sure he lost no time
in doing.
In the meantime, as if these struggles were not enough to engage
all his energies, he had been busy playing the first scene of that
love-tragedy, or melodrama, or farce--one hardly knows what to call
it--which ended by joining him in uneasy and brief wedlock with
Henriette Smithson, an Irish actress. It is hard to tell how far
the throes of his very Gallic heart were genuine, how far they were
manufactured by his susceptible fancy, his literary imagination, and
his keen sense for dramatic effect. There is ever about Berlioz a
trace of the little boy playing pirate chief; he goes through life
with something of that youthful ecstasy of make-believe; and when he
tells us of his passions for Mdlles. S----, R----, and M----, when he
enumerates his thrills, commemorates his tears, and confides his plans
for capture, flight, suicide, or double murder, we wonder whether he
really felt all this, or is merely convinced, as a poet and journalist,
that he ought thus to have acted.
It was in 1827 that Berlioz first beheld his future wife, who was
acting Shakespeare at the Odéon in a troupe of English players. Of
the effect of her Juliet upon him he writes, "After the third act,
hardly breathing, in pain as if a hand of iron were squeezing at my
heart, I said to myself, with the fullest conviction: 'Ah! I am
lost.'" Did he make any attempt to meet the lady whose beauty and
genius had so singularly affected him? Not he; such a course would
have been painfully commonplace, a terrible descent from poetry to
prose. He followed her about with gaunt eyes and dishevelled mien, so
that, believing him mad, she asked her friends for protection. He lost
himself in melancholy revery, he roamed about the streets at night,
in such despair that on one occasion Liszt and Chopin followed him,
fearing he might kill himself. Then he rallied his forces in a great
resolve; he would win his indifferent mistress by his art; he would
give a concert of his own works, and she should hear it. "I will show
her," he cried, forgetting in his enthusiasm that she had no ear for
music, "that I too am an artist." After heroic labors and economies
(for it was at this time that he was supporting himself by singing in
the theatre chorus, and he had to work sixteen hours a day copying
instrumental parts), after endless struggles with his conductor, who
did not understand the music, and with Cherubini, who refused him the
only available concert hall, he succeeded in bringing off the concert,
only to find that Miss Smithson did not hear of it at all. Shortly
afterward she left France for some years.
Disconsolate, Berlioz turned for comfort to a certain Mademoiselle
Mooke, to whom he became engaged in 1830, soon after winning the _Prix
de Rome_. This affair, however, went little more smoothly than the
other, for hardly had he arrived in Italy before he received a letter
from Madame Mooke, informing him that her daughter had married M.
Pleyel. His rôle was thus suddenly changed to that of the abandoned
lover, thirsting for revenge; and it must be conceded that he entered
upon it with his usual artistic enthusiasm. "Two tears of rage started
from my eyes, and my mind was made up on the spot. I meant to fly to
Paris, where I had two guilty women and one innocent man"--one sees
that magnanimity was a part of the rôle--"to kill without mercy. As
for killing myself afterwards, you can well believe that that was
indispensable." Behold him, then, in Florence, supplying himself with
two double-barrelled pistols, "two vials of refreshment, such as
laudanum and strychnine," and, as a disguise, the entire costume of
a lady's-maid--no less--dress, bonnet, green veil, and all. Behold
him hesitating but one moment, just long enough to write upon the
unfinished score of the Ball Scene in his "Symphonie Fantastique"
directions as to how, if the work is played "in his absence," the flute
part may be doubled with the clarinets and horns. Behold him, after
this lucid interval, travelling to Genoa, where he either attempts
suicide by drowning or falls into the water and is fished out by
bystanders--his account is somewhat ambiguous--and where he buys a
second lady's-maid's costume, having absent-mindedly left the first one
in the coach. And then, with his arrival at Nice, he feels that he has
done his duty by the part of the wronged lover, he feels that it would
be a pity to deprive the world of his still unwritten compositions;
youth pleads the charm of life, the beauty of the Italian landscape,
and prudence suggests a brief note to the director of the Academy at
Rome, providing for a possible return to the fold. "I stop in Nice a
whole month, wandering through the orange groves, diving in the sea,
sleeping on the mountain heaths.... I live wholly alone, and write the
overture to 'King Lear.' I sing, I believe in God. Convalescence has
set in." "It is thus," he ingenuously concludes his account of this
episode, "that I passed in Nice the twenty happiest days of my life."
On returning to Paris, in 1832, and finding Miss Smithson again playing
there, Berlioz tried again, and this time with success, the device of
giving a concert of his own works. His "Symphonie Fantastique" and
its sequel "Lelio," a monodrama with recitation, were given entire.
Whatever might be her ignorance of music, Miss Smithson could hardly
fail to divine the reference to herself of a typical passage in the
text of "Lelio": "O that I could find her, the _Juliet_, the _Ophelia_,
that my heart calls to. That I could drink in the intoxication of that
mingled joy and sadness that only true love knows! Could I but rest
in her arms one autumn evening, rocked by the north wind on some wild
heath, and sleep my last, sad sleep!" This somewhat florid wooing was
effective; on the day after the concert the oddly assorted pair met
for the first time, and in the following summer were married. In taking
this daring step Berlioz seems for once to have manfully forgotten his
audience and his dramatic unities, and to have acted quite simply and
from the heart. His Ophelia was no longer a favorite of the public;
she was now neglected and deeply in debt; she had had the misfortune
to break her leg in stepping from her carriage, an accident which
threatened to end her career on the stage; her parents, as well as
his own, were bitterly opposed to the match. In spite of all, Berlioz
married her, and made no literary material out of the event except
to weave about it one of his incisive antitheses: "On the day of our
wedding she had nothing but debts; I, for my part, had three hundred
francs ... and had quarrelled again with my parents. But she was mine,
I bade defiance to everything." It is much to his credit, too, that
when his wife was ill, he quite simply set aside a symphony at which he
was working, and wrote feuilletons in order to make more money for her.
But the one thing to which Berlioz could never effectually bid
defiance was the radical inconstancy of his own temperament. Once
captured and domesticated, his Ophelia began to prove dull; the part
of husband gave little play to his romantic capacities; and when he
took less and less pains to disguise his boredom, she became jealous
even to shrewishness. Presently he sought distraction in the least
creditable of all his amours. If the Smithson affair had been drama,
or at the least melodrama, and the Mooke episode harmless comedy, the
liaison with Mademoiselle Recio, aside from its tragic results, was
broad farce. This lady was a second-rate vocalist with an insatiable
ambition to sing Berlioz's works, in order to defeat which he had
often to resort to ignominious flight, covered by petty prevarication.
His devotion to her cannot have resulted in much happiness, and it
entirely alienated him from his wife, from whom he separated about
1840. Nevertheless, when she died in 1854, he promptly married this
Mademoiselle Recio, with whom he lived in uneasy partnership for eight
years.
One of the strangest instances of his morbid appetite for effect at
any cost, of the habit of posturing and parading his emotions which
ruled him even in matters which should be most private and sacred,
is the passage in the autobiography in which he describes, with a
Poe-like zest for revolting detail, the reburial of his first wife
beside the second in the cemetery of Mont-Martre. The incredible
passage need not be quoted in detail, but ends with this sentence,
in which the egotism of the sentimentalist stands as naked as it is
unashamed: "The two departed ones rest here in peace [_sic_] to this
hour, awaiting the time when I shall bring my own portion of rottenness
to that charnel-house." This is an extreme instance of the posturing,
the attitudinizing, the grandiloquence and rhetoric, to which Berlioz
is always tempted more or less in his accounts of his personal doings
and feelings. He does not wilfully misrepresent, but he balks at the
grayness of mere fact; he is not exactly a liar, but his romantic
imagination simply cannot envisage the commonplace; involuntarily he
suppresses here, distorts or exaggerates there, in order that his story
may have the spectacular vividness, the dramatic éclat, which alone can
satisfy him.
On the other hand, whenever, treating of general topics, as he does in
the "Soirées d'Orchestre," the "A Travers Chants," and the "Grotesques
de la Musique," he can avoid the pitfall of the confidential, he is
one of the most charming of writers. Here his instinct for the salient
leads him to put everything in the most vivid, captivating way, but
without perversion; one no longer has the uncomfortable sense of being
hoaxed, and can give oneself up to the enjoyment of his rich play of
metaphor and allusion, his subtle irony, his unfailing good-nature,
and his nervous, incisive style. Here, in short, his extraordinary
intellectual vivacity is revealed at its best, undegraded by being
made to serve those posings which, if not precisely dishonest, are
still not quite ingenuous. His description, for example, of the
machinations of the _claqueurs_ or hired applauders at the opera
house, known in Parisian slang as "Romans," in the seventh and eighth
evenings of the "Soirées d'Orchestre,"[30] deserves a niche of its own
in the literature of satire. After writing at some length "de viris
illustribus urbis Romae," he goes on to enumerate the amateurs who
swell the ranks of the _claque_, as follows:--
"They are: simple friends, who admire in good faith all that is to
be done on the stage before the lamps are lighted; relations, those
_claqueurs_ given by nature; editors, ferocious _claqueurs_; and
especially lovers and husbands. That is why women, besides the host
of other advantages they have over men, have still one more chance
of success than they. For a woman can hardly applaud her husband or
lover to any purpose in a theatre or concert room; besides, she always
has something else to do; while the husband or lover, provided he has
the least natural capacity or some elementary notions of the art, can
often bring about a success of renewal at the theatre.... Husbands are
better than lovers for this sort of operation. The latter usually stand
in fear of ridicule; they also fear _in petto_ that a too brilliant
success may make too many rivals; they no longer have any pecuniary
interest in the triumphs of their mistresses. But the husband, who
holds the purse-strings, who knows what can be done by a well-thrown
bouquet, a well taken-up salvo, a well-communicated emotion, a
well-carried recall, he alone dares to turn to account what faculties
he has. He has the gift of ventriloquism and of ubiquity. He applauds
for an instant from the amphitheatre, crying out: _Brava!_ in a tenor
voice, in chest tones; thence he flies to the lobby of the first boxes,
and sticking his head through the opening cut in the door, he throws
out an _Admirable!_ in a voice of _basso profundo_ while passing by,
and then bounds breathless up to the third tier, from whence he makes
the house resound with exclamations: 'Delicious! ravishing! Heavens!
what talent! it is too much!' in a _soprano_ voice, in shrill feminine
tones stifled with emotion. There is a model husband for you, and a
hard-working and intelligent father of a family."
The impression of paradox so markedly given by Berlioz's prose
writings, in which such insight, wit, and good humor as we have here
coexist with the tendency to pose revealed in his accounts of his
love affairs, is intensified by his musical compositions. In them
also he seems actuated by a desire, not to communicate his real
feelings in their simplicity, but to project them into a dramatic
conception, and to present that with all the pomp and circumstance of
which he is capable. Not truth to inner experience, but vividness of
external effect, is his ideal. Yet to the service of this ideal he
brings admirable intellectual qualities: ingenuity, resourcefulness,
imagination, an originality that scorns all platitude, and, at least
in the matter of instrumentation, a matchless technical skill. The
brilliant performance of rather specious undertakings--that is
Berlioz's artistic cue.
This combination of trivial ends with highly clever means may be
illustrated by the "Symphonie Fantastique," a work which, though
written early in his career, remains one of his most characteristic
productions. How different, to begin with, are the inspirations which
a romanticist and a realist derive from the passion of love! Schumann,
married to Clara Wieck after years of waiting, utters his joy in
a series of songs, the most lyrical, the most intimate, that song
literature has to show. Chopin, in an amorous revery, writes in the
larghetto of the F-minor Concerto one of the quietest, simplest, most
devout of all his pieces. Berlioz, on the contrary, is goaded by the
thought of his Ophelia to conceive "a young musician of unhealthily
sensitive nature," who "has poisoned himself with opium in a paroxysm
of love-sick despair," and to carry this hero through a very detailed
drama in five acts.[31] His impulse is, in short, realistic rather
than lyrical, and the art in which he embodies it is descriptive and
narrative rather than emotionally expressive.
The most important technical result of this realistic attitude is
that Berlioz, as we have already noted, treats his melodies, not
as materials for a purely musical development, but as symbols of
characters or other dramatic motives, thereby anticipating the
_leit-motif_ idea which later became so prominent in the work of Wagner
and Liszt. The central motive in the "Symphonie Fantastique" is the
melody known as "_l'idée fixe_," symbolizing the beloved, roughly
transcribed for the piano in Figure XXIV.
[Illustration: score]
Figure XXIV.
This melody, though it appears in each of the five movements, undergoes
but little evolution; it is complete in the first place, and in its
later phases is often modified hardly at all, or if so chiefly for
dramatic reasons. In the Ball Scene two phrases of it are sounded
pianissimo, by the clarinet, just after a sounding climax of the full
orchestra,[32] to indicate the hero's remembrance of the beloved in
the midst of the festivities. In the third movement, "In the Country,"
it is given to the oboe and flute (full score, p. 66), and is treated
somewhat more ingeniously, its fifth phrase being interrupted by a
rough tumult in all the strings. In "The Procession to the Stake" it
figures purely as a theatrical property in a highly characteristic
and amusing passage. The hero has finished his long march to the
place of execution; as he puts his head on the block silence descends
upon the scene, and then a single clarinet plays four measures of the
theme--"Ah! he thinks of her once more"--but the thought is cut short
by a blow of the axe (fortissimo chord, _tutti_) and the death-rattle
(tremolando on three kettle-drums) ends the movement and his life
together. Only in the last movement, the frenetic "Witches' Sabbath,"
is the theme really varied. Here, at p. 102, it appears as in Figure
XXV, turned by change of rhythm and the addition of ornament into a
grotesque, undignified dance tune.
[Illustration: score]
Figure XXV.
This is certainly clever, but the incentive, we must remember, is still
dramatic rather than musical--it is intended to show the loved one
degraded to the horrid form of a witch.
There are many other subordinate features of the technique in which
may be discerned the same preoccupation with spectacular effect rather
than with musical beauty. The mere noise resorted to by the composer in
tuning his drums in the third movement, in order to imitate thunder,
has already been mentioned;[33] there is a deal of even more chaotic
pandemonium in the last two movements. When the harmonies are in
themselves consonant, they are sometimes combined so incongruously as
to obliterate all sense of tonality and to generate merely a feeling
of haste and confusion, as at page 94 in the score, where the chords of
D-flat-major and G-minor tread on one another's heels; so unprecedented
was this association of remote harmonies that Berlioz thought it
necessary to point out in a foot-note that it was no clerical error,
and to beg the violins and violas not to "correct" their parts. Even
the scholastic and highly formal device of the fugato he treats with
the _sang froid_ of the habitual impressionist in that weird section of
the "Witches' Sabbath" in which he makes a sort of devil's fugue, lost
in limbo, on the rhythm of the witches' round dance (score, p. 132).
Yet how remarkable is the skill with which he works out his so perverse
ideal! His melodies, however they may lack lyrical quality, are always
of definite contour and arresting individuality, and frequently of an
odd half-insidious, half-challenging appeal. Though Mr. Hadow's charge
that "time after time he ruins his cause by subordinating beauty to
emphasis, and is so anxious to impress that he forgets how to charm"
is undoubtedly just, yet equally true is his further remark that "his
sense of rhythm was, at the time when he lived, without parallel in the
history of music." Thanks to this sense of rhythm he entirely avoided
those wall-paper patterns which make much of the music of romanticism
so formally monotonous, and he attained often a splendidly complex,
though generally slightly mechanical, organization of phrases. The
_idée fixe_ is a good example of this prosodic elasticity. It consists
of an eight-measure phrase balanced by one of seven measures, four
phrases of four measures each in climactic sequence, and a codetta
made up of a pair of two-measure phrases and a final phrase of five
measures; and with all this variety, the unity of the tune as a whole
is unimpeachable. The melody of the song "La Captive" (see Figure
XXVI) is most fascinating in its irregular regularity, in the perfect
naturalness with which three-measure and two-measure groups alternate
and intertwine. In fact, Berlioz is a master of what in poetry we call
versification.
[Illustration: score]
Figure XXVI.