It’s a major birthday today for those of us who admire the seething Romantics.

I’ve written a lot about Hector Berlioz over the years (feel free to search at rossamico.com), but because of the day’s obligations and the mounting pressure of the holidays, I thought I could get away with sharing a few caricatures.

After all, Berlioz had one of the great heads of hair in all of classical music, and his compositions have invited parody by cartoonists who fill with their pages with exploding cannon, roaring choruses, and ruptured eardrums. No one can say Berlioz didn’t earn it, although he could exercise touching restraint, on occasion, as in his chansons, his song cycle “Les Nuits d’été,” and his Christmas oratorio “L’Enfance du Christ.”

Yeah, he could be a little crazy at times, like when he wouldn’t take no for an answer when attempting to woo the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, to the point that he composed an epic, programmatic symphony, evocative of an opium-induced fever dream, her murder (!), his execution, and a witches’ sabbat, hoping to impress her. (He did.)

Or the time he raced back to France from Italy in a coach with two loaded pistols, a vial of poison, and women’s clothes, planning a cross-dressing murder of his inconstant fiancée and her lover. (He abandoned the plot after he forgot the dress when changing coaches.)

But he could also be incisive in his observations and exhibited a wry sense of humor in his writings.

The website at the link below is full of amusing Berlioziana, and in fact it was in doing an image search for caricatures that I discovered it. The administrators are a husband-and-wife team of retired Scottish academics who are passionate about the composer. The site is the result of nearly 30 years’ effort. A lot of the images were scanned from their own personal collection, so if I’m going to violate their claim of copyright by borrowing a couple to illustrate this piece, I might as well give them some free publicity and direct you to the site, which is quite staggering as a resource for information about the composer. It betrays an obsessive quality worthy of the great Berlioz himself!

Thank you, Michel Austin and Monir Tayeb*, for all your hard work and generosity. And happy birthday, Hector Berlioz!

http://www.hberlioz.com

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*In looking more deeply into the website, I learn that Monir Tayeb passed away in 2021. My condolences to her widower, Michel Austin. I certainly mean no disrespect with my whimsical tone. I am sincerely awed by their accomplishment!

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IMAGES: From “The Hector Berlioz Website,” cartoons published in “Le Figaro,” March 3, 1883: “H. Berlioz – Before” and “H. Berlioz – Today”

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