Hector Berlioz
(La Côte-Saint-André, France, 1803-Paris, 1869) French composer.Romanticism has in Hector Berlioz one of its paradigmatic figures: his romantic and passionate life and his desire for independence are reflected in a daring music that does not admit rules or conventions and that stands out, above all, for the importance given to the orchestral timbre and the extramusical, literary inspiration.Not in vain, together with the Hungarian Franz Liszt, Berlioz was one of the main promoters of so-called program music.
Hector Berlioz
Son of a renowned doctor from Grenoble, it was precisely his father who transmitted his love of music to him.On his advice, the young Hector learned to play the flute and guitar and to compose small pieces for different ensembles.However, music was not his father's career; and so, in 1821 Berlioz moved to Paris to pursue medical studies at the university.He did not conclude them: fascinated by the operas and concerts that could be heard in the French capital, the future musician soon abandoned his medical career to follow the musical, against the family will.Gluck, first, and Carl Maria von Weber and Beethoven, later, became his most admired musical models, while Shakespeare and Goethe were in the literary field.
Admitted to the Conservatory in 1825, he was a disciple of Jean François Lesneur and Anton Reicha and obtained, after several unsuccessful attempts, the prestigious Prix de Rome awarded annually by that institution.This was in 1830, the year that saw the birth of the work that established him as one of the most original composers of his time: the Fantastic Symphony , subtitled Episodes from the life of an artist .An autobiographical inspiration page, the fruit of his unrequited passion for the British actress Harriet Smithson, it contains all the features of Berlioz's style, from his masterful knowledge of the orchestra to his predilection for extremes-which sometimes leads to the use of certain effects-, the overcoming of the traditional symphonic form and the subordination to an extra-musical idea.
The orchestra, above all, becomes the great protagonist of the work: an orchestra of extreme richness, full of surprising tonal findings as well as novel sound combinations, which in later works the musician expanded and further refined, and that they found in his Treatise on instrumentation and orchestration his most successful theoretical embodiment.Such was the success achieved by the Fantastic Symphony that its author was immediately considered at the same level as Beethoven, an exaggerated comparison but which perfectly illustrates the originality of Berlioz's proposal, at a time when that many of the Bonn musician's innovations had not yet been assimilated by the public and critics.
After the premiere of this score, the French musician's career developed rapidly, although it was not without difficulties.In 1833 he got the hand of Harriet Smithson, which fulfilled one of the composer's dreams, although the relationship between the two was far from idyllic.During the 1830s, despite the failure of his opera Benvenuto Cellini , other programmatic symphonies increased Berlioz's fame: Harold in Italy , based on a text by Lord Byron , a monumental Requiem and the choral symphony Romeo and Juliet , based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet .
A A new lyrical work, the ambitious epic The Trojans , was to occupy him for four years, from 1856 to 1860, without ever seeing it performed in its entirety on stage.The unsuccessful efforts to release it, together with the indifference and even hostility with which each of his new works was received in France, are some of the reasons that explain that the last years of Berlioz's life were marked by the feeling that he had failed.In your own country.
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