Hector Berlioz

Uniquely among the great composers, Berlioz’s music owed almost nothing to the technical or stylistic methods of his predecessors, and sprang instead from an individual creative brilliance that often bewildered audiences at the time. He was born 1803 in Isère in south-eastern France; his father was a doctor who sent his son to study medicine in Paris, where Berlioz determined to become a composer. In 1827 he fell wildly in love with Harriet Smithson, an Anglo-Irish actress whose Shakespeare performances thrilled him; he responded to her refusal to meet him by composing the Symphonie fantastique, an ultra-Romantic portrayal of doomed love, orchestrated with unprecedented virtuosity. The premiere in 1830 made Berlioz’s name; two years later, he and Smithson were married. Berlioz was now working as a music critic; major premieres of his music included the Grande messe des morts (Requiem Mass, 1837) for huge choral and orchestral forces, and the Shakespeare-inspired “dramatic symphony” Roméo et Juliette (1839). During the next two decades Berlioz toured widely as a successful conductor, and composed the cantata La damnation de Faust (1846) and the choral “sacred trilogy” L’Enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ, 1850-56). Smithson died in 1854, and that year Berlioz married his partner of 20 years, the singer Marie Recio. His vast, five-act opera Les Troyens (The Trojans, 1854-56), based on Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid, was staged only incomplete before his death in 1869.