Hector Berlioz was a man governed by his passions.
When rejected by the object of his desire, the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, he frenziedly dashed off his “Symphonie fantastique,” an opium-induced fever dream that envisions his own execution for murdering her. In the last movement, her spirit reappears in the midst of a witches’ sabbath, to jeer at his headless corpse. Perhaps counterintuitively, Smithson went for this in a big way, and the two were married, though, perhaps unsurprisingly, not at all happily.
Berlioz’s biography is full of crazed, seething adventures. Whether in regard to his affairs of the heart, his musical education, or his notorious compositions, always he was driven by mercurial passion and excess.
He lived large, and he dreamed big music. One need only think of his Requiem, with its massive choir, antiphonal brass ensembles, and 16 timpani. The composer even suggested the orchestration could be doubled or tripled, depending on the size of the space. (However, in an uncharacteristic show of restraint, he recommended the chorus be limited to 400 singers, except in some of the larger numbers.)
Today is Berlioz’s birthday. It also happens to be the Christmas season, so naturally my thoughts gravitate to “L’enfance du Christ” – which, I must say, is not my favorite Berlioz work. Fortunately, he also composed a “Messe solennelle” in 1824, on virtually the same subject – the commemoration of the Feast of the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents by King Herod, in his attempt to the snare the baby Jesus.
Berlioz was only 20 years-old at the time, but already he was driven by his creative demons. If you are a fan of the composer, you must hear this piece, which teems with presentiments of many of his major works, including the “Symphonie fantastique,” “The Damnation of Faust,” “Benvenuto Cellini” (with its “Roman Carnival Overture”), and of course the Requiem.
Berlioz himself played the tam-tam at the work’s premiere, and in his excitement gave the instrument such a blow that it knocked everyone back in their pews. The “Messe” was favorably received (unusual for this composer), but Berlioz decided he hated the piece and wound up burning the score.
The work was believed lost for nearly 170 years, until it was rediscovered by a Belgian schoolteacher, in an organ gallery in Antwerp, in 1991. Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducted the first modern performance two years later.
Who knows how Berlioz would have reacted? This is the guy, after all, who once responded to a Dear John letter by racing back from Italy in full drag, bearing two pistols and vial of poison.
No one partied like Hector Berlioz. Happy birthday, my misguided friend.
John Eliot Gardiner conducts the rediscovered “Messe solennelle”
A knock-out recording of the “Symphonie fantastique,” conducted by Argentinean powder keg Carlos Païta – with an interesting choice of imagery: 48 minutes of fetishizing an antique Chinese vase! An exercise in misguided passion, perhaps worthy of Berlioz himself.
