Hector Berlioz (1803 – 1869): L’Enfance du Christ
When he was twelve years old, Hector Berlioz fell passionately in love with a girl six years his senior. Her name was Estelle – “tall, graceful, with large, grave, questioning eyes that yet could smile,” he fondly recalled, “hair worthy to ornament the helmet of Achilles, and feet – I will not say Andalusian, but pure Parisian, and on those little feet she wore … pink slippers!”
Berlioz never forgot the pink slippers, nor indeed the captivating effect the young woman had on him: “I had been struck by lightning. To say I loved her comprises everything. I hoped for, expected, knew nothing but that I was wretched, dumb, despairing.” He went for long, solitary walks to indulge in endless daydreams about her, his moods alternating ecstatic joy with agonised longing. There was of course no chance of Estelle ever returning his feelings, even as his infatuation quickly became an open secret in the neighbourhood. “Does time heal all wounds; do other loves efface the first?” Berlioz asked himself thirty-five years later. “Alas, no! With me time is powerless. Nothing wipes out the memory of my first love.”
Berlioz eventually left his childhood town of La Côte-Saint-André, situated in the Alpine foothills, aged seventeen and never lived there again. But at roughly fifteen-year intervals, he would go back and have further encounters with Estelle. At around thirty, he was on a home visit when his mother mischievously asked him to deliver a letter addressed to a “Madame F”. Not knowing who Madame F was, Berlioz then almost died of shock when he encountered her in person – “Estelle!” Although now married, she remained everything he had ever dreamed of – “still lovely, still the nymph, the hamadryad of Meylan’s green slopes. Still lovely with her proud carriage, her glorious hair, her dazzling smile. But ah! where were the little pink shoes?” – although on that occasion he was not sure she even recognized him.
In his late forties, Berlioz made a more deliberate attempt to reach out to her, writing her a letter, but she did not respond. Then as an ailing old man in his sixties, he finally dared to turn up on her doorstep and confess his lifelong devotion. Rather like the elderly Fermina Daza repelling the advances of Florentino Ariza in Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Estelle politely sent him packing.
Berlioz’s dogged pursuit of a woman he scarcely knew, and upon whom he would project all kinds of poetic fantasies, followed a pattern. It was a pattern he would repeat in his twenties, albeit more successfully, with an alluring Shakespearean actress named Harriet Smithson, who later became his wife. It was as if he could never quite let go of his inner teenager. Perhaps too the whole act of falling in love always made him think of Estelle and of his whole happy childhood, a time when the world had seemed so fresh and wonderful.
It wasn’t just romantic feelings that knocked Hector sideways in his youth: his infatuations spread just as quickly to music, nature and even to the Catholic church. He never forgot how the music at his first communion had filled his “whole soul… with mystic passion.” And while he would lose his religious faith in adulthood, he would retain a lifelong veneration for the rich ceremonial beauties of Catholic worship.
His 1837 Requiem (also known as the Grande Messe des Morts) had already suggested that veneration, and it remains one of the greatest compositions ever written in the form. Berlioz was still in the halcyon days of his firebrand youth when he wrote it, a period that would also see him turn out such masterpieces as the Symphonie Fantastique, Harold en Italie and his Shakespeare-inspired symphonie dramatique, Roméo et Juliette. But he was also hard up, with a young family to support, and most of his livelihood came from working as a music critic. It was a role he unreservedly detested – “oh! the horror of it!” he once said. “To eternally pamphleteer for a living! It is cruel!”
After an unexpected gift of 20,000 francs from violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini had allowed him to take a year off and focus on his compositions, Berlioz’s career at last started to take flight – or at least it did abroad. In Paris it remained oddly stillborn. But there again he also possessed a wonderful talent for rubbing the city’s musical establishment up the wrong way, something that had resulted in him making some powerful enemies. Firstly, he had driven Luigi Cherubini – then France’s premier composer – to complete distraction with his wild antics at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1820s. Then he had become a music critic and subjected various other musical grandees to his caustic diatribes in the eminent Parisian periodical, the Journal des Débats.
Berlioz’s inherently abrasive nature – he was often restless, moody and hard work to be around – did nothing to help his popularity in his home city. Above all, there was the sheer startling modernity of the music he wrote. Expanding the old symphony orchestra and using it in new and innovative ways may have been fascinating for some, but for most Parisians it was ear-splitting cacophony.
The opera houses and main concert halls of Paris seldom programmed Berlioz’s music, and when they did, his enemies would bribe audience members to stamp their feet and suddenly demand to have the Marseillaise played midway through a performance. Berlioz would be left to organize and finance concerts of his own music, something that usually left him out of pocket. Admittedly, he didn’t help himself with his chronic unwillingness to write anything not involving huge (and expensive) orchestral and choral forces: violin sonatas and string quartets never seemed to cross his mind.
Naturally he grew frustrated with the underlying culture of the French capital. “You can have no idea of my existence in that infernal city that thinks itself the home of Art”, he once said. Elsewhere: “Parisians are barbarians; not one rich man in ten has a library, no one buys books—they hire feeble novels at a penny a volume from circulating libraries—this is sufficient mental food for all classes. For a few francs a month they hire from the music shops the flat and dreary compositions with which they overflow.” In all, he described Paris as “the apotheosis of industrialism in Art.”
The big question is why Berlioz chose not to move abroad, when most other European cities were showing a good deal more enthusiasm towards his music. It wasn’t as if he didn’t recognise as much. “Everywhere I met with success and made friends” he wrote after one “arduous pilgrimage” to Germany in the early 1840s – “how can I thank thee, Germany, noble foster-mother to the sons of music?” In Austria a year or so later: “My reception by all in Vienna – even by my fellow-ploughmen, the critics – was most cordial; they treated me as a man and a brother, for which I am heartily grateful.” He even enjoyed great success in Prague (despite the city’s inherent suspicion towards any piece of music written since 1791), and in conservative-minded London, “where, at least, the wish to love music is real and persistent.”
But it was in St Petersburg that he scored one of his greatest critical and financial successes, with one concert alone netting him 12,000 francs. Not only was his music rapturously received everywhere he went, but he was also told he could rehearse his musicians as long as he desired before each concert. After a separate performance of his Requiem had “thanks to the generosity of the Russian aristocracy” made him another handsome profit, Berlioz joked “give me a despotic government as nursing mother of Art!”
Despite offers of more permanent work from both Germany and Britain, Berlioz could never quite bring himself to leave his home city. For all its faults, its worship of comic opera and virtuosic salon music (both of which he hated), its cultural superficialities and conservatism, he just never fully felt himself anywhere but Paris. “When dull days come and mists rise, the fever of Paris seizes me once more and I feel that here only is life possible” he wrote in 1844 to his friend Ferdinand Hiller.
Berlioz preferred to travel, so long as he always had his flat in Paris (latterly in the Rue de Calais) to come back to each time. He also put all those days on the road to good use. During a lengthy tour of Germany in 1845, he filled much of his time composing a major new work, his opera-oratorio La Damnation de Faust (based upon Goethe’s dramatic poem). He then made the mistake of having it staged at the Paris Opéra-Comique a year later. It was not a success. “It was twice performed to half empty houses and elicited no more attention than if I had been the least of Conservatoire students”, Berlioz recalled bitterly. With neither the public nor critics enthused, further performances of the work were cancelled. “Nothing in all my career has wounded me as this did”, Berlioz reported. He vowed that he would never again entrust an oratorio to the “tender mercies of Paris.”
He did not however keep his word, even if his next Parisian oratorio would begin life as a practical joke. Berlioz had by this stage become thoroughly fed up with the automatic hostility accorded to his music by so many of his fellow city folk. “If [certain people] were asked their opinion of the chord of D major (being warned beforehand that I had written it),” he once complained in his Memoirs, “they would declare with indignation: ‘What a detestable chord!’”
In 1850 he had written a little organ piece, later arranged as a choral anthem which he entitled L’Adieu des Bergers (The Shepherds’ Farewell). But this wasn’t Berlioz’s own handiwork, the composer claimed. The music actually came from a hitherto lost manuscript dating back to 1679, written by the little-known 17th century French composer, Pierre Ducré. Berlioz even claimed to have found the score stuffed inside a dusty cupboard at Saint-Chapelle, and that its “archaic” notation had taken him some time to decipher. All of this was of course complete baloney, and one wonders how Berlioz kept a straight face, not least when one of his harshest critics subsequently claimed that “Berlioz would never be able to write a tune as simple and as charming as this little piece by old Ducré.”
Although Berlioz soon after owned up to being the real author of the anthem (which would go on to become one of his famous compositions), he then had the idea of extending the music, even if the process would happen in several stages. Firstly, he added another choral movement plus an overture to L’Adieu des Bergers, now calling the whole composition, La Fuite en Egypt (The Flight into Egypt). Sensing that the piece still lacked something, he duly added a second section, L’Arrivée à Sais (The Arrival at Sais), and then a third, to precede the other two, Le Songe d’Hérode (Herod’s Dream). In this way, Berlioz finally completed the 90-minute trilogie sacrée (sacred trilogy) which he would call L’Enfance du Christ, in the summer of 1854.
Unlike many of Berlioz’s later works, L’Enfance has never had any trouble establishing itself in the classical repertoire and it was also – most unusually for Berlioz – an almost instantaneous hit when first performed in Paris. For many it seemed to signify a new and more agreeable phase to Berlioz’s creative development. In addition, the relatively modest (by Berlioz’s standards) musical forces required for the work – a Beethoven-sized orchestra, a four-part chorus plus soloists – have always made it reasonably user-friendly to perform.
Yet first appearances can also be deceptive: a closer acquaintance with the work reveals no slackening of Berlioz’s customary intensity, while his imaginative span is as rich as ever. It might be truest to say that L’Enfance represents the work of a mature artist, one who has now thoroughly mastered his craft while still possessing his full range of creative powers.
Broadly speaking, the music is a retelling of the Christmas Nativity, moving from the darkness of the first section Le Songe d’Hérode to the relative light and sense of hope in L’Arrivée à Sais. Le Songe focuses on Herod’s recurring dreams about a newborn child who will one day rise up and overthrow him, as he sings a long, tormented aria against a richly textured orchestral accompaniment. Finally, he summons his soothsayers (portrayed in the orchestra as both creepy and comical) who eventually instruct him to kill every newborn child in the region. “Eh bien” (very well) says the king, and he orders the Massacre of the Innocents, allowing Berlioz the opportunity to show he can still turn out music of genuine drama and power. The action finally moves to Bethlehem, with the infant Christ in the manger, while Mary and Joseph are warned by an angel to escape to Egypt.
The second section, La Fuite en Egypt, duly describes their journey. La Fuite was of course the original, much shorter version of the work, and it is built around the famous anthem, L’Adieu des Bergers.
In the final section, L’Arrivée à Sais, Mary and Joseph are initially rejected in the Egyptian city of Sais for being Hebrew, before being taken in by a family of Ishmaelites. The music depicts their welcome, with Joseph greeted like a brother and offered work as a carpenter, while Mary is told to rest “and worry no more”. There is even room for an instrumental number, a trio for two flutes and harp, suggesting that Berlioz could have churned out light (and highly saleable) chamber music if he had so chosen.
After the narrator describes the first ten years of Jesus’ life, the work ends with an unaccompanied anthem, O mon âme (O my soul), one of the most beautiful and serene things that Berlioz ever wrote. At this point it’s possible to imagine the composer still ruminating on the heavenly singing he had heard at his first communion in La Côte-Saint-André more than forty years earlier.
The almost unanimous praise Berlioz received for the oratorio delighted him almost as much as it frustrated him. For him it was final proof that the Parisian audiences and critics simply did not understand his music. While acknowledging that L’Enfance had been “written almost throughout in a quiet, tender vein”, he insisted that he had always been able to compose such music:
In that work many people imagined they could detect a radical change in my style and manner. This opinion is entirely without foundation. The subject naturally lent itself to a gentle and simple style of music, and for that reason alone was more in accordance with their taste and intelligence. Time would probably have developed these qualities, but I should have written L’Enfance du Christ in the same manner twenty years ago.
Whatever its success, L’Enfance did not lead to a new rapprochement between Berlioz and the musical establishment of Paris. He continued to have other works rejected, and a further blow fell when the Conservatoire banned him from renting their concert hall for future events (even though this had often been the only means by which Berlioz could perform his own music).
Tragedy was also stalking him on a more personal level. His marriage to Harriet Smithson – once his fair Ophelia on the Shakespearean stage and the central inspiration for his Symphonie Fantastique – had never been a particularly happy or successful one. Now it was reaching its final stages, as a major stroke had left Harriet disabled since 1847. But even with all his poetic dreams long since vanquished, Berlioz only felt his love grow for Harriet during these later years, and he would nurse her painstakingly and tenderly. When she finally died in 1854, he was devastated. “My sufferings were indescribable,” he admitted. Further losses would rock him to the core in the years ahead – although he married again, his second wife would also die before him, succumbing to a heart attack in 1862. Even worse was the premature death of his beloved (and only) son Louis in 1867.
Age was beginning to catch up on the embattled composer: his health was faltering along with his overall spirits. Ever more depressed about his low standing in his home city, he embarked upon one final attempt to achieve glory on the Parisian stage, now undertaking a grand five act opera based upon Virgil’s Aeneid, Les Troyens. Although Berlioz completed the work by 1858, he then had to wait a further five years to have it performed while the Paris Opéra ummed and arred over whether they wanted it or not. In desperation, he finally turned to the smaller Théâtre Lyrique who accepted only the latter three acts of the work, before subjecting them to endless further cuts and alterations, largely to meet the facile sensibilities of their audiences.*
*Among other things excised by the theatre management was the inclusion of a four-stringed lyre (“rather dangerous”), the use of the word “triumphaux” (“it is not much used… people will certainly laugh”), Mercury’s wings (“those wings on his head and his heels are really too comical”) and finally Aeneas’ helmet (a local street-seller named Mangin wore a similar looking headpiece, hence whenever Aeneas appeared on stage “the gallery cads will howl ‘Look, there’s Mangin!’”) – “Can anyone conceive what these crass idiots made me endure?” Berlioz raged afterwards.
In all, this truncated version of Les Troyens would only run for a disappointing twenty-one nights. But even with its various emasculations and the usual carps from Berlioz’s enemies, to many others it still made a profound impression (the German opera composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer, was sufficiently impressed that he attended a dozen performances). Perhaps best of all, the royalties which Berlioz received from the performances (as both librettist and composer), plus the sale of the piano score, earned him a modest fortune, sufficient for him to retire.
“My work is over” he wrote soon afterwards. “Othello’s occupation’s gone. I no longer compose, conduct, write either prose or verse. I have resigned my post of musical critic and wish to do nothing more… I read and re-read; in the evenings I stroll past the theatres in order to enjoy the pleasure of not going in… I relish having no articles to write and being thoroughly lazy.”
Although he added that he was “past hope, past visions, past high thoughts”, the old romantic spirit still burned within him. On a nostalgic visit to La Côte-Saint-André, he once again became caught up with thoughts about his childhood love, Estelle. Elated to discover she was still alive, he duly took his courage into both hands and presented himself on her doorstep. Although Estelle was now a white-haired widow of 67, Berlioz was in no mood to hold back half a century of pent-up passion. “For forty-five years I have loved you”, he duly told her:
You are my childhood’s dream that has weathered all the storms of my most stormy life. It must be true—this love of a life-time—could it, else, master me as it still does?… Do not take me for an eccentric, a plaything of my own imagination… I loved you, I love you still, I shall always love you, although I am sixty-one and for me the world has no more illusions. Oh, madame! madame! I have but one end in life—to gain your affection!
Estelle was in turn somewhat bewildered and even a little frightened by this entirely unexpected overture. And when Berlioz subsequently wrote to her to ask whether they could correspond in the future, she refused and there might have been the end of it. But when Estelle’s daughter and husband were shortly after due to visit Paris, Estelle had the good sense to ask them to look up the amorous old composer. Berlioz received them warmly and laid on the charm over several days, successfully breaking the ice. Thereafter he remained in friendly contact with Estelle for the rest of his life, even as, much as in Berlioz’s youth, there was no question of anything developing between them. He might then have recognized that his life really had come full circle.
He lived out his short retirement modestly enough, aside from making another momentous conducting tour of Russia in the winter of 1868. He was by now gravely ill and in constant pain with chronic neuralgia, and yet he would forget all of that as soon as he reached the podium, performing as well as ever. He was also amazed by the quality of the players: “What an orchestra! What ensemble! What precision! I wonder if Beethoven ever heard anything like it…”
But the trip also seemed to use up his last reserves of energy. Having returned to France, he quickly went downhill after a series of strokes, with the end finally arriving in February 1869. Shortly before his death he had remarked, “could I but live a hundred and forty years my musical life would become distinctly interesting!”
His music has at least lived on another hundred and forty years and counting. And he has remained one of the most original composers of his day, and in his home country of France, one of its most singular and unique. In the history of music, there has never been anyone else quite like Hector Berlioz.