Hector Berlioz
Louis-Hector Berlioz[n 1] (11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869) was a French Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem and L'Enfance du Christ, his three operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette and the "dramatic legend" La Damnation de Faust.
"Berlioz" redirects here. For other uses, see Berlioz (disambiguation).
The elder son of a provincial physician, Berlioz was expected to follow his father into medicine, and he attended a Parisian medical college before defying his family by taking up music as a profession. His independence of mind and refusal to follow traditional rules and formulas put him at odds with the conservative musical establishment of Paris. He briefly moderated his style sufficiently to win France's premier music prize – the Prix de Rome – in 1830, but he learned little from the academics of the Paris Conservatoire. Opinion was divided for many years between those who thought him an original genius and those who viewed his music as lacking in form and coherence.
At the age of twenty-four Berlioz fell in love with the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, and he pursued her obsessively until she finally accepted him seven years later. Their marriage was happy at first but eventually foundered. Harriet inspired his first major success, the Symphonie fantastique, in which an idealised depiction of her occurs throughout.
Berlioz completed three operas, the first of which, Benvenuto Cellini, was an outright failure. The second, the epic Les Troyens (The Trojans), was so large in scale that it was never staged in its entirety during his lifetime. His last opera, Béatrice et Bénédict – based on Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing – was a success at its premiere but did not enter the regular operatic repertoire. Meeting only occasional success in France as a composer, Berlioz increasingly turned to conducting, in which he gained an international reputation. He was highly regarded in Germany, Britain and Russia both as a composer and as a conductor. To supplement his earnings he wrote musical journalism throughout much of his career; some of it has been preserved in book form, including his Treatise on Instrumentation (1844), which was influential in the 19th and 20th centuries. Berlioz died in Paris at the age of 65.
Life and career[edit]
1803–1821: early years[edit]
Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803,[n 2] the eldest child of Louis Berlioz (1776–1848), a physician, and his wife, Marie-Antoinette Joséphine, née Marmion (1784–1838).[n 3] His birthplace was the family home in the commune of La Côte-Saint-André in the département of Isère, in south-eastern France. His parents had five more children, three of whom died in infancy;[7] their surviving daughters, Nanci and Adèle, remained close to Berlioz throughout their lives.[6][8]
Recordings[edit]
All of Berlioz's major works and most of his minor ones have been commercially recorded. This is a comparatively recent development. In the mid-1950s the international record catalogues listed complete recordings of seven major works: the Symphonie fantastique, Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, Harold in Italy, Les Nuits d'été, Roméo et Juliette, the Requiem and the Te Deum, and various overtures. Excerpts from Les Troyens were available but there were no complete recordings of the operas.[201]
Recordings conducted by Colin Davis are prominent in the Berlioz discography, some studio-made and others recorded live. The first was L'Enfance du Christ in 1960 and the last the Requiem in 2012. In between there were five recordings of Les Nuits d'été, four each of Béatrice et Bénédict, the Symphonie fantastique and Roméo et Juliette, and three of Harold in Italy, Les Troyens, and La Damnation de Faust.[202]
In addition to Davis's versions, Les Troyens has received studio recordings under Charles Dutoit and John Nelson; Nelson and Daniel Barenboim have recorded versions of Béatrice et Bénédict, and Nelson and Roger Norrington have conducted Benvenuto Cellini for CD. Singers who have recorded Les Nuits d'été include Victoria de los Ángeles, Leontyne Price, Janet Baker, Régine Crespin, Jessye Norman and Kiri Te Kanawa,[203] and more recently, Karen Cargill and Susan Graham.[204]
By far the most recorded of Berlioz's works is the Symphonie fantastique. The discography of the British Hector Berlioz website lists 96 recordings, from the pioneering version by Gabriel Pierné and the Concerts Colonne in 1928 to those conducted by Beecham, Pierre Monteux, Charles Munch, Herbert von Karajan and Otto Klemperer to more recent versions including those of Boulez, Marc Minkowski, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and François-Xavier Roth.[205]