Berlizo: The Artist Unreconciled

...After great suffering and many hardships, they married...

...There is a glossary of people and places mentioned in the text, notes on errors of fact and chronology or emendations to the information given by the author, and perhaps most interesting, a culling of observations on the composer by his contemporaries...

...Augustine's Confessions, or in the romantic fashion inaugurated by Jean Jacques Rousseau...

...On the other hand, suppose Berlioz had patronage such as Wagner's, or the ability to earn his living as a performer, like Beethoven or Mozart, instead of by writing, which did not leave time for his composing...

...When his wife was dying, he had to abstain from composing altogether, since it took too much time from his articles...

...There is something comic about the young red-haired fanatic who used to entertain the pit with his imprecations against tampering with the masters, and his bursts of emotion at sublime passages...

...Cairns is more delicate than other, earlier authorities—Ernest Newman, for one?sparing the reader an account of Berlioz' letter to a friend boasting of his wife's premarital virginity, or the account of Harriet's cruel treatment at the hands of Marie Recio, or of the composer's quarrel with Estelle over money...

...Cairns makes it clear that neither the passion or the irony are false, that they both express the human greatness of Berlioz, not his bizarre idiosyncracies...

...In Berlioz' case, he never composed many projects dear to him, being convinced that they would be scorned and neglected...

...All his life, Berlioz suffered from hearing his music badly performed and badly received, or slighted (he died without ever seeing a public performance of part one of Les Troyens...

...It was at once comic and diabolical...

...And then, with his typical honesty he adds in a poignant parenthesis, "The truth is I am not reconciled...

...Berlioz remarks caustically, "My father seemed unaware that he was less intolerant of second-rate doctors, who are as numerous as bad artists and not merely useless but positively dangerous...

...Cairns has done a splendid job in this edition of the Memoirs...

...Estelle was older than Berlioz, and he did not become friends with her until she was a widow and he in his 60s...

...When he eventually abandoned medical study, his mother cursed him and refused to see him...

...The Memoirs are not introspective in the stylized formal manner of St...

...In the midst of the ensuing hubbub I looked round and saw a young man literally shaking with rage, his fists clenched, his eyes blazing, and a head of hair?how can I describe it...

...It is easy to overemphasize Berlioz' eccentricity, to portray him as a grotesque, a parody of the romantic artist, a historical imitation of E. T. A. Hoffman's Kapelmeister Johannes Kreisler...

...But the autobiography is not a "confession," as Berlioz states clearly in the beginning...

...Although his father's reaction was less violent, he warned nevertheless that it would be "an unspeakable grief and humiliation" to see his son become a second-rate artist...

...Berlioz' life consisted of misunderstanding and struggle...

...yet only pity and terror are aroused at the sight of the aged, broken composer weeping for his hopeless love and a recognition of his genius that he would never see...

...Liszt wrote him following her death, "She inspired you, you loved her and sang of her, her task was done...

...We are offered here a more judicious sifting of the material than in previous editions, and a more sympathetic portrait of the subject...

...Even without the importance of his music, Berlioz' book would be remarkable, and not merely because of its picture of a fascinating period of European history, the aftermath of the Napoleonic era, or its brilliant portraits of such fellow musicians as Franz Liszt, Niccolo Pag-anini and Felix Mendelssohn...

...He conceived a plan to return to Paris in the disguise of a chambermaid, and kill her, her mother, his rival, and himself...

...two piccolos!' He then sat down again indignantly...

...The sight of the third-rate composers who found favor in the public eye, while he did not, drove him almost to the point of madness, eventually broke his spirit, and at the very end caused him to lose faith in his own abilities...

...Because of their distrust of his experimentation, and his disregard of rhythmic and harmonic conventions, he was kept for several years from winning first prize in the institute's annual competition...

...In this Berlioz centenary, when we are able better to understand and appreciate his music, this new edition of the Memoirs is a fitting tribute to his magnificent and tragic spirit...

...The two most famous of his involvements were his affair with the 19-year-old pianist Camille Moke, for a brief period the rival of Liszt, and his grand passion for the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson...

...it never loses the acerb tone and ironic humor which keep the bursts of passion from repelling the reader...

...From the age of 12 on, he was in love—usually unhappily...

...Randall Jarrell has written: "When the world rejects, and then forgets, a writer's most profound and imaginative book, he may unconsciously work in a more limited way in the books that follow it...

...His book is the kind of self-justificatory autobiography we see in John Ruskin's wistful Praeterita, or Benvenuto Cellini's alternately boastful and persecuted portrait of the artist...

...In fact, he was given more honor outside his own country, especially in Hungary, Russia and parts of Germany, and was forced to earn his living by reviewing...

...Still, he never completely lost his affection for Harriet—he always supported her, and felt deep guilt about his desertion...

...While this gave him a chance to get back at his enemies, it also made him more unpopular with them...

...His father, a doctor on the Cote Saint-Andre, had encouraged him to learn music, but was horrified when the boy wished to make it his profession rather than medicine...

...When Camille jilted him, Berlioz was at the French Academy in Rome...

...Beginning as Romeo, he became Hamlet, bruised by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and ended as Lear, robbed of everything but a dignity born of desperation...

...Above all, it is a justfication of ideals, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave us in his Biographia Literaria: less an analysis of events than an explanation of emotional and intellectual make-up and purpose...

...For more than anything else, it is the tragic story of a man whose genius was suppressed and whose creativity was eventually destroyed by a country and an age that did not understand him...

...At the end of the Memoirs he wrote: "I must be reconciled to her having known me, too late, as I am reconciled to not knowing Virgil, whom I should have loved, or Gluck or Beethoven—or Shakespeare, who might perhaps have loved me...

...Had Estelle loved him, his ardor would most likely have cooled as it did in other cases...

...The first and last object of his love, however, was Estelle Duboeuf Fornier, who had lived near the Berliozes on the Cote Saint-Andre, and whom he again encountered late in life...

...But he was saved by his desire to achieve something, by the feeling that it was unthinkable "to say farewell to life and art, to leave behind me the reputation of a boor, a savage who does not know how to live, to leave my first symphony unfinished, to have other, greater works in my head unwritten...

...the combination of Shakespeare and the young Irish actress was too much for Berlioz' romantic sensibilities...

...Until recently, many of his major works were seldom performed even in the great concert halls of Europe and the United States, while the score of his enormous opera Les Troyens was published only this year...

...Reviewed by PHOEBE PETTINGELL "Suddenly, in the middle of the introduction to Casper's song, one of my neighbors rose, leaned over towards the orchestra and shouted in a voice of thunder, 'Not two flutes, you wretches—two piccolos...

...Berlioz strove in his compositions to capture the essence of his heroes—Romeo, Faust, Hamlet, Benvenuto Cellini, Pros-pero, Aeneas, Lear—because he saw something in them akin to himself...

...the union proved disastrous, and in a few years he left her for a singer, Marie Recio...

...His writings have fared better than his music in some respects, and English editions of Memoires de Hector Berlioz, as well as his book of criticism, Les Soirees de I'Or-chestre ("Nights in the Orchestra"), have been available before...

...This was one contemporary's first sight of Hector Berlioz—composer, clitic and eccentric, whose violence of opinion and revolutionary music caused him to be regarded as a mad iconoclast in his own lifetime, and a curiosity of the Romantic movement by later generations...

...At the Paris Conservatory, Berlioz ran afoul of a number of the directors, especially Luigi Cheru-bini, composer of Medee...

...After his third try, the composer Daniel Auber advised, "Write conventionally, and when you have produced something that strikes you as horribly conventional, it will be just what is required...

...Indeed, it is probable that with his temperament he would never have been reconciled, even if his life had been easier...

...Now, in this centenary year of the composer's death, David Cairns has done an entirely new translation of the Memoirs, adding voluminous footnotes and appendices in a considerable display of scholarship...

...Similarly, it might be argued that Berlioz' passionate fanaticism about music, or his cruel wit, would have earned him hatred from his colleagues in any event —that he made himself a victim by the intensity of his reactions...

...his translation imparts the vigor of Berlioz' style in excellent English...

...He succeeded in this, in both music and life—and all too well...

...Berlioz seldom reveals details of his private life, and happily refrains from examinations of conscience...

...His passion for Harriet began when he saw her as Ophelia...

...With even greater feeling, Berlioz himself said that she was a harp "whose strains were part of all my concerts, my joys and sorrows—of whose strings, alas, I broke many...

...Berlioz' conflicts were not confined to his music...

...An immense umbrella or movable canopy overhanging the beak of a bird of prey...