Hector Berlioz is famous, but not popular. He is, in fact, the only great composer of the 19th century never to have been popular. To be sure, his best-known composition, the Symphonie fantastique, is part of the standard orchestral repertory, and his music has been championed by such noted conductors as Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, Sir Thomas Beech-am, and Sir Colin Davis. But his large-scale works for chorus and orchestra—Roméo et Juliette, La damnation de Faust, L’enfance du Christ, and the Requiem—are heard only rarely in concert, while his operas are almost never staged by major houses. It is chiefly through recordings that in our age Berlioz has found an audience; even so, his admirers, though fervent, remain strikingly small in number.

No less striking is the long list of distinguished composers and critics who have had substantial reservations about the quality of Berlioz’s music or have actively disliked it. Felix Mendelssohn, for example, dismissed it as “indifferent drivel”; Giuseppe Verdi, who described Berlioz as “greatly and subtly gifted,” went on to say that he “lacked the calm and what I may call the balance that produce complete works of art”; Igor Stravinsky called his reputation as an orchestrator “highly suspect.”

Berlioz was even less popular during his lifetime than today. In Paris, where he lived for his entire adult life, his orchestral music was, with rare exceptions, heard only at performances he organized and conducted himself. This may be partly attributed to the decadent state of French musical culture in the mid-19th century, which was wholly dominated by opera—most of it trashy, much of it even worse. But in part, it was owing to something else: unable to earn a living by composing, Berlioz wrote music criticism for the Journal des débats, one of the most influential newspapers in Paris, and he thereby antagonized the very people who might have helped get his works performed.

As it happens, however, Berlioz’s literary career is of more than merely biographical interest: he was by far the most gifted among those composers of the first rank who have successfully doubled as professional writers. He contributed regularly to the Journal des débats from 1834 to 1863, publishing three best-selling collections of his critical essays, and his posthumous memoirs are now widely acknowledged to be a classic of 19th-century autobiography. So stylish a writer was Berlioz that he was long known less for his music than for his prose. Interest in his writing has remained high to this day, as can be seen by the fact that Hugh Macdonald’s Selected Letters of Berlioz, which contains 481 of his 4,000-odd surviving letters, is one of the few recent volumes of its kind to have been brought out by a trade publisher rather than by an academic press.¹

Macdonald, who is joint editor of the French-language edition of Berlioz’s complete correspondence, has done an exemplary job of assembling this collection, the first to appear in English since 1966. It contains a representative, extensively annotated selection of letters drawn from the whole of the composer’s long and eventful life and addressed to correspondents including Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Napoleon III, and Queen Victoria.

Like everything Berlioz wrote, his letters are irresistibly readable, and do more than any of his other writings, even the vivid memoirs, to illuminate his volatile personality. In the process, they also do much to explain why his music, for all its undeniable greatness, has consistently failed to please a wide public.

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Louis-Hector Berlioz, the eldest of six children, was born in La Côte St. André, a village near Grenoble, in 1803. His father, a freethinking country doctor (he was the first Western physician to experiment with acupuncture), undertook the boy’s education, teaching him Latin, geography, and music. As a result, Berlioz’s early musical training was sketchy—unlike most composers, he never learned to play the piano, opting instead for the flute and guitar—and he heard little classical music other than that which he played and sang for himself.

Yet Berlioz had already begun composing by the time he was thirteen. At seventeen, when he went to Paris to study medicine, he was convinced that it would be a grave mistake to follow in his father’s footsteps. Although he attended medical school for two years, he spent virtually all his spare time writing music, going to the opera, and studying composition at the Paris Conservatory. In 1824, he finally informed his father that his medical studies were at an end:

I am being dragged involuntarily toward a magnificent career (there is no other epithet fitting for a career in the arts) and not toward my destruction. I believe I shall succeed, yes, I believe it, and considerations of modesty are no longer relevant. . . . That is my way of thinking, that is how I am, and nothing on this earth will change me.

Berlioz’s very bourgeois family was understandably horrified by his decision, and his allowance was cut in an attempt to bring him to his senses. Instead of giving in, he enrolled as a full-time student at the Paris Conservatory, winning the Prix de Rome in 1830. By then, he had produced three works—the Waverley and Francs-juges overtures and the cantata La mort de Cléopatre—in which his mature style was unmistakably foreshadowed. During that same time, he saw Shakespeare’s Hamlet, heard Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Symphonies, and read Goethe’s Faust, all of which inspired him to break free of the sterile neoclassicism that dominated official French art of the day.

Berlioz accomplished this goal in 1830 with the Symphonie fantastique, in which he cast off the conventions of traditional musical form to create a five-movement “episode in the life of an artist.” The Symphonie purports to tell the story of his love for Harriet Smithson, a Shakespearean actress with whom he had become obsessed (and whom he married three years later). A long, irregularly phrased and accented melody—the idée fixe—is heard in all five movements, symbolizing the composer’s obsession, and a program note explains to the listener precisely what each movement is meant to portray, from a fancy-dress ball to a witches’ sabbath. The sound and texture of the Symphonie fantastique are as original as its form: the orchestration is strongly colored yet slender and transparent, and strict counterpoint is avoided save for ironic effect.

With the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz emerged as the first composer fully to embody the expansive subjectivism of the Romantic movement. Liszt, who attended the premiere, subsequently arranged the work for solo piano and played it all over Europe; Robert Schumann wrote enthusiastically about the published version of Liszt’s arrangement. Other progressive musicians readily acknowledged Berlioz as the fountainhead of musical Romanticism; they included Wagner, who wrote to Liszt, “In the present period we alone are on a par—that is, You, He, and I.”

For the rest of his life, Berlioz wrote almost exclusively for orchestra, employing instrumental forces of unprecedented size. (The Requiem, composed in 1837, calls for an orchestra of 100 strings, 20 woodwinds, 12 horns, 16 timpani, and 4 antiphonal brass choirs.) Ambitious to a fault, he sought inspiration in the supreme masterpieces of literature, producing a choral symphony inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; an oratorio, La damnation de Faust, based on Goethe; and an opera, Les Troyens, based on Virgil’s Aeneid²

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As extravagant as Berlioz’s music was his personality, and to this the letters amply attest. In them, extreme ambition vies with no less extreme idealism to produce an almost ecstatic vision of the place of art, and the artist, in society:

If music were not abandoned to public charity, we should have in Europe a theater, an operatic Pantheon, exclusively devoted to the performance of monumental masterpieces, in which they would be produced at long intervals, with a care and a magnificence worthy of them, by ARTISTS, and heard, as part of solemn musical festivals, by audiences of feeling and intelligence.

That a man of such hyper-refined sensibilities should have been forced to cover third-rate opera performances for a living is among the great ironies of musical history. It was emphatically an irony not lost on Berlioz himself, whose letters are full of complaints about his fate:

This evening I’ve got a dreadful article to write on a large operetta by Auber; it’s music for milliners sung by smart young ladies-about-town and commercial travelers; I’ll say it’s quite nice, without adding “for salesgirls.” What drudgery!!

As these and other letters make abundantly clear, however, Berlioz’s Romantic idealism was tempered by self-deprecating wit and an engagingly wry sense of the absurd. Though he took himself no less seriously than did Wagner or Liszt, there was nothing earnest about his seriousness, which is to say nothing Germanic. For all his admiration of Beethoven and Goethe, he was French to the core—as French as Lord Byron, in many ways his soulmate as a Romantic figure, was English.

One sees evidence of this difference in Berlioz’s music, in which the most exaggerated forms of Romantic subjectivism are held in check by a near-classic sense of restraint far removed from the mainstream of 19th-century Germanic musical tradition. Among the most revealing examples is the love scene from Roméo et Juliette, in which intense passion is portrayed in a tightly controlled, almost chaste, manner. The passion comes through clearly—Toscanini once described this movement as “the most beautiful music in the world”—but is never allowed to lapse into humid excess.

David Cairns, Berlioz’s greatest biographer, has aptly described the unusual sensibility on display in the love scene as “a core of reserve at the heart of [the] most fiery intensities. You cannot wallow in it. It can be intoxicating, but to the spirit more than to the senses.” Unfortunately, this reserve went largely unnoticed by Berlioz’s contemporaries. Rather, he was seen through the philistine eyes of the Parisian press, which regularly caricatured him as a cynical purveyor of musical explosions. (“My friend,” says a character in a cartoon of the period, “I see that you are addressing me, but I have just come from a Berlioz concert and I cannot understand a word you are saying.”) For this reason, and despite the steadfast advocacy of Liszt, Schumann, and Wagner, French concertgoers refused to give his music a proper hearing.

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The Story of Berlioz’s middle age is a tale of protracted disillusion. Though acclaimed as a conductor throughout Europe, he was unwilling to settle in any city but Paris, the one place that would have nothing to do with him; his occasional concerts there, always given at his own expense, failed to turn a profit large enough to allow him to give up criticism. The Paris Opera showed no interest in his music, and the Paris Conservatory declined to appoint him as a teacher. “In Paris,” he wrote, “music is a god—so long as only the skinniest sacrifices are required to feed its altars.” To boot, his marriage to Harriet Smithson proved disastrous.

Berlioz’s last major undertaking as a composer was Les Troyens, on which he began work in 1856. Within two years, the four-hour-long opera was substantially complete, but another five years went by before he was able to persuade a company, the Théâtre-Lyrique, to mount a production of the last three acts (the first two remained unperformed until 1890). Though Les Troyens à Carthage, as the second part of Les Troyens was known, proved successful—Berlioz made enough money from it to retire at last from music criticism—he was enraged at the cuts made by the producer and subsequently refused permission during his lifetime for any other productions.

In retirement, depression and ill health made it impossible for him to compose:

I am living in absolute emotional isolation. I do nothing but suffer for eight or nine hours a day, without hope of any sort, with no ambitions beyond sleep, and appreciating the truth of the Chinese proverb: “Better sitting than standing, better lying than sitting, better asleep than awake, and better dead than asleep.”

He spent his last years finishing his memoirs, conducting in Vienna, Cologne, and St. Petersburg, writing increasingly unhappy letters to his friends, and mourning the death of his only son. Berlioz died in 1869, mostly forgotten by the residents of the city he loved—and hated—more than any other.

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Throughout his life, Berlioz blamed his lack of success on the ignorance and poor taste of the concertgoing public:

It is only natural that many should regard me as a lunatic; I regard them as children or half-wits. To such people all music that deviates from the narrow path where the makers of opéras-comiques toil and spin, inevitably seems and has seemed for a quarter of a century the music of a lunatic.

But his failure to engage the great mass of concertgoers was—and is—not entirely their fault. Many, perhaps most, listeners are made justifiably uncomfortable by what the critic Sir Neville Cardus called the “dry-eyed pathos” of Berlioz’s music, in which wild, even neurotic, emotions are kept under the closest possible rein. Small wonder that Verdi, the least neurotic of composers, found him lacking in “balance.” In fact, balance is the defining characteristic of Berlioz’s music, but it is an uneasy balance of violent forces locked in perpetual opposition. For Berlioz, the “core of reserve” was not a mode of artistic expression so much as a means of self-protection, a way of drawing back from the abyss of derangement:

The other day I was singing some of the numbers [from Gluck’s opera Iphigénie en Tauride] and got quite carried away. I began to tremble so violently, weeping and dribbling from the mouth, and my heart began to beat so fearfully that I went up to my room so as not to be discovered in such a state, and as soon as I got through the door I felt so ill I had to sit down.

It was not until the 20th century that critics, scholars, and performers (most of them, significantly, English and American) discovered the real Berlioz. To this day, however, his high-strung style has continued to prove elusive to lovers of Romantic music who are accustomed to the comparative straightforwardness of Wagner or Schumann. The peculiarities of his temperament make it likely that he will always remain an artist for the few rather than the many, like Henry James in literature or Edouard Vuillard in painting. But for those who respond to his uniquely individual voice, no music is more expressive or moving. To read Hugh Macdonald’s finely edited volume of Berlioz’s letters is to be brought appreciably closer to the endlessly interesting mind of the man who made it.

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¹ Norton, 479 pp., $35.00.

² Sir Colin Davis recorded all of Berlioz’s major works for Philips in the 60’s and 70’s, and these performances, now available on CD, are consistently high in technical quality and musical understanding. Also of interest are Sir Thomas Beecham’s vivacious 1959 recording with the Orchestre National de I’ORTF of the Symphonie fantastique (EMI CDM 7 64032 2); Arturo Toscanini’s 1947 broadcast performance with the NBC Symphony of Roméo et Juliette (RCA Victor Gold Seal 60274-2-RG, two CD’s); Serge Koussevitzky’s 1944 recording with violist William Primrose and the Boston Symphony of Harold in Italy (Biddulph WHL 028); and a collection of overtures and excerpts from longer works recorded between 1927 and 1934 by Sir Hamilton Harty, the first modern conductor regularly to perform Berlioz’s music (Pearl GEMM CD 9485).

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