Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz
11.12.1803 - 08.03.1869 (65 years) (La Côte-Saint-André, Isère, France)
Louis-Hector Berlioz (; French: [ɛktɔʁ bɛʁljoz]; 11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869) was a French Romantic composer. His output includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique (1830) and Harold in Italy (1834); choral pieces, among which are his Requiem (1837) and L'enfance du Christ (1854); three operas: Benvenuto Cellini (1838), Les Troyens (1858) and Béatrice et Bénédict (1862); and works of hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette (1839) and the "dramatic legend" La damnation de Faust (1846). As the elder son of a provincial doctor, Berlioz was expected to follow his father into medicine, and he attended a medical college in Paris before defying his family and 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 enough to win France's premier music prize, the Prix de Rome, in 1830, but he learned little from the academics of the Paris Conservatoire. His music divided opinion for many years between those who thought him an original genius and those who thought his music lacked form and coherence. A romantic in his personal life as well as in his art, Berlioz fell in love in 1826 with an Irish Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson, and pursued her obsessively; she finally accepted him in 1833. Their marriage was happy at first, but eventually foundered. She 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 huge epic Les Troyens (The Trojans) was too large in scale for the opera managements of the period to cope with, and 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 gain a secure place in 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 throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. He died in Paris at the age of 65.