Louis Hector Berlioz was born in La Côte-Saint-André in the French province of Isère on December 11, 1803. He began studying music at age 12 by writing small compositions and arrangements. His father, a physician, sent him to Paris to study medicine. Berlioz was horrified by the process of dissection, and, despite his father's disapproval, abandoned medicine to pursue a career in music. He studied music from 1823 to 1825 at the Paris Conservatoire under the French composer Jean François Le Sueur and the Czech composer Anton Reicha.
When he was twenty-three, Berlioz was overwhelmed with the works of Shakespeare and also fell madly in love with a Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson, to whom he wrote such wild, impassioned letters that she considered him a lunatic and refused to see him. To depict his "endless and unquenchable passion," Berlioz wrote the Symphonie fantastique in 1830, which "startled Parisians by its sensationally autobiographical program, its amazingly novel orchestration, and its vivid depiction of the weird and diabolical."
In 1830, the same year as the symphony's premiere, Berlioz finally won the Prix de Rome, submitting a new cantata every year until he succeeded at his fourth attempt. The prize subsidized two years' of study in Rome.
When he returned to Paris, he finally met and married Harriet Smithson - after she had attended a performance of the Fantastic Symphony and realized that it was a depiction of her. Berlioz's son Louis was born in 1834, but his marriage was already in trouble. Harriet was driven to alcohol by the collapse of her acting career, prompting Berlioz to begin an affair with the singer Marie Recio. The marriage finally broke up in 1841.
A performance of Berlioz's music in 1833 caught the attention of Niccolo Paganini, the great violin virtuoso. Paganini lavished praise upon Berlioz and commissioned him to write a work for viola and orchestra. When Berlioz sent him the first movement of the new work, Paganini rejected it because of its lack of "complexity." Eventually the piece became Harold in Italy, a symphony for viola and orchestra, and the other three movements were completed in 1834. After hearing it for the first time, Paganini, according to Berlioz's Mémoires, knelt before Berlioz in front of the orchestra and proclaimed him a genius and heir to Beethoven. The next day he sent Berlioz a gift of 20,000 francs, the generosity of which left Berlioz uncharacteristically lost for words.
Harold in Italy was followed by the Grand Messe de Morts (the Requiem) in 1837; Roméo and Juliet, a 'dramatic symphony', in 1839; and the Symphonie funebre et triomphale in 1840.
Berlioz completed the dramatic cantata La Damnation de Faust in 1846, but it was a failure in Paris. The Te Deum and the oratorio L'Enfance du Christ followed in the years 1850 and 1854, Béatrice et Bénédict in 1862 and in 1856 Berlioz embarked on his massive opera Les Troyens, based on Virgil's Aeneid, which he finished in 1863. Attempts to have it staged in Paris were futile, due to the work's immense scale. Despite these setbacks, Berlioz was beginning to receive international recognition for his music, and his writings, particularly his Treatises on harmony and orchestration, became standard textbooks.
After 1840, Berlioz decided to conduct most of his own concerts, tired as he was of conductors who did not understand his music. This decision launched what was to become a lucrative and creatively fruitful career in conducting music in England, Germany and Russia both of himself and other leading composers. As one of the first great conductors, he influenced a whole generation of musicians. But his last years were bitter. The loss of his father, his son Louis (1867), two wives, two sisters and friends merely accentuated the weary decline of his last years. He was passed over for important positions and honors and composed very little during the six years before his death in 1869.
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