An Episode in the Life of an Artist

“ Which of the two powers can raise man to the most sublime heights, love or music? .... It is a great problem. Yet, methinks, we should say this : Love can give no idea of music, music can give an idea of love. . . . Why separate the one from the other ? They are the two wings of the soul.” — HECTOR BERLIOZ.

THIS is the title of one of the most important works of Hector Berlioz (his Opus 14), — a work which, apart from its intrinsic musical and literary worth, gains interest from the fact that its hero, as in Dickens’s David Copperfield or Thackeray’s Pendennis, is none other than the author himself. It is also especially noteworthy as being the best exponent of the great French symphonist’s peculiar attitude toward his art of any of his earlier compositions. The work is divided into two parts, the former of which is the well-known (or rather, much heard-of) Fantastic Symphony, and the latter the lyric monodrama of Lélio, or the Return to Life.

The plot is simple and eminently characteristic of Berlioz. A young musician, as desperately as hopelessly in love, tries to poison himself with opium; but the dose proves too slight to kill; he is merely thrown into a profound lethargy, in which the strangest dreams come to him, — dreams which partake more and more of the nature of nightmare, until, in an access of terror, he awakes to find himself alone in his artist’s garret. He hears the voice of one of his fellow musicians singing Goethe’s ballad of The Fisherman in the next room. Thinking over his own unhappy plight, which had so nearly brought him to the same pass as the luckless angler in the song, he forms the resolution to banish, if possible, all thoughts of love from his diseased brain, and to seek consolation in his art alone. He soliloquizes upon the art of music, the joys, sorrows, temptations, and duties of artists, his new-born purpose gaining strength the while, until the hour strikes at which he is expected at the theatre to superintend the last rehearsal of one of his own compositions for chorus and orchestra. The scene changes, and we next see him at the head of a large body of singers and players, conducting the performance of his Dramatic Fantasia on Shakespeare’s Tempest. His artist’s enthusiasm rises to the most joyous pitch in this triumphant exercise of his power; but at the end a sad recollection of the old forlorn love comes over him, not to be banished nor forgotten, and he sadly wends his way homeward. This is a bare sketch of the story.

This strange work was begun in 1829, Berlioz being then in his twenty-sixth year and a pupil at the Conservatoire in Paris; it was virtually completed in Rome in 1831, and was brought out entire at the Conservatoire on the 9th of December of the following year.

The celebrated Fantastic Symphony, which forms the first part of the work, is assuredly one of the most remarkable compositions that has ever been put upon paper, and was, in fact, the keystone to Berlioz’s fame. Considered from a purely musical point of view, it departs far less from the common symphonic form than is generally supposed. Very unusual orchestral means are employed in it, to be sure, but, excepting that it comprises five movements instead of the orthodox four, it differs but slightly in musical form from other symphonies. It has the standard allegro with a slow introduction, a scherzo in triple time, an adagio, a march, and a fnale in which there is a good deal of fugued writing. Its special musical peculiarity is a single theme, which continually makes its appearance in one shape or another throughout the whole symphony; this is the principal motive of the first allegro, but it is treated episodically in all the other movements. The frequent reappearance of this theme during the course of the symphony finds its justification in the poetic plan of the work, and leads us directly to the point in winch the Fantastic Symphony differs from its great predecessors in the symphonic form. Berlioz’s symphony is the first of a long line of modern orchestral compositions which the world has agreed to class together under the name of programme-music. In writing it, the composer tried to depict a certain train of events, a description of which was to be printed on the programme when the work came to be performed, that the audience might therefrom arrive at a better understanding of the music. It may be well here to make as clear as possible the distinction between programme-music and pure symphonic writing. This distinction is by no means an entirely sharp one, and it is often not easy to determine to which order of composition a work belongs. In the case of Beethoven’s A-major symphony (No. 7) or Mozart’s symphony in C (so-called the Jupiter) there is no difficulty; both works evidently belong to the latter class. On the other hand we have Liszt’s Les Préludes, in which the music follows out the quotation from Lamartine, which the composer has taken for his text, sentence by sentence. Unless the listener is acquainted with this text, he will of necessity overlook the whole dramatic significance of the music. Les Préludes is evidently programme-music. But when we come to Beethoven’s F-major symphony (No. 6) or Liszt’s Tasso we are somewhat at a loss precisely how to classify them. The movements of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony have, beside the usual indications (such as allegro, andante, vicace, etc.), the following headings, which were plainly intended to be, and in practice are, printed on the programme for the benefit of the listener : —

(1.) Happy feelings on arriving in the country.

(2.) By the brookside.

(3.) Merry-making of villagers, thunderstorm, and

(4.) Thanksgiving after the storm.

This Certainly looks like programmemusic. The listener’s thoughts are no longer under the influence of the music alone, but are to some extent guided by a previous knowledge, not obtained from the work itself, of what the music strives to express. But is not this equally the case with every composition that has any title whatever? If I see a funeral march on a programme, I feel well assured beforehand that I am to hear music which seeks to express grief in some form; nay, more definitely, grief for the departure from this life of a fellow-mortal. But, I should not call the march programme-music, for all that. In listening to the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony, the audience know that the music seeks to express not only happiness in general, but happiness at arriving in the country in particular; yet if this fact is to be considered as a proof that the movement in question is programme-music, then must we place the funeral march also in the same category. The cases are exactly parallel. Again, Liszt’s Tasso, which from its very title of Symphonic Poem would seem most naturally to belong to the category of programme-music, cannot strictly be so classed; the mere words Lamento e Trionfo, which are appended to the title, are nothing more nor less than an indication of the character of the composition. The distinction between these works and the symphonies which are universally recognized as belonging to the domain of pure music is that in the one case the general character of the music is announced in the title, and in the other case it is not. The mode of development of the musical germ or theme is not affected by this title. But in programme-music properly so called, not only the general character but the whole organic development of the music is to a great extent conditioned by the poetic text (whether in verse or prose matters not) which the composer has taken upon himself to illustrate in tones. The music seeks to paint not merely a certain quality of feeling, but a definite succession of events set down in the text.

Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony is the musical picture of the unhappy young musician’s dream while he is under the effect of opium. The ever - recurring theme, which is one of the musical peculiarities of the work, is the representation in tones of the beloved woman herself. As her image pervades the artist’s dream, so does this melody pervade the whole symphony.

The heading of the first movement is Reveries—Passions. The opening largo in C-minor expresses that vague Sehnsucht nach der Liebe with which young hearts are not unacquainted. The leading motive of this largo, first given out by the muted strings, and afterwards taken up by the rest of the orchestra, has a little history of its own. When only thirteen years old, Berlioz fell desperately in love with a beautiful young girl of eighteen, who lived near his father’s house at La Côte-Saint-André (a small country town near Grenoble). The name of the cruel fair one was Estelle. The course of this strange, passionate adoration, forgotten at twentyone and revived with hundred-fold intensity at sixty, may be followed in Berlioz’s autobiography. This love is almost the only genial ray that illumines the dark pages of that “ tragedy written in tears of blood;” Berlioz’s adoring worship of the Stella montis (as he called her) and his love for his art were the two utterly pure and beautiful elements in a life which sad experiences and balked ambition rendered almost wholly tragic, and in which much was awry and ugly. The young Hector did not avow his passion, perceiving well that Estelle appreciated the difference between their ages far more keenly than he was disposed to do, and that she in her quality of young woman looked upon him as a mere boy with whom it was good sport to flirt in lack of more worthy game. But he read and reread Florian’s pastoral of Estelle et Némorin, and set many of its verses, whose rather flaccid sentimentality harmonized well enough with his own forlorn plight, to music in his beloved’s honor. The melody of one of these songs, to the words,

is the leading motive of the largo in the Fantastic Symphony. The song itself had been burnt up long before, but when he began the symphony in 1829, he used the melody again, note for note. It was a rather ironical stroke of fortune, for An Episode in the Life of an Artist was written in honor of a far other flame; but he could not foresee at that time what an enduring influence upon his life his first love was destined to have.

This largo is full of vague, dreamy beauty and potential passion. Two glorious bursts of the full orchestra usher in the allegro in C-major, which begins almost immediately with the Fixed Idea; in other words, with the musical incarnation of the beloved woman, whose image suddenly appears to the young dreamer in the full splendor of youth and maidenly beauty. It is beside my present purpose to give a musical analysis of this movement, or, indeed, of any part of the work, which would be impracticable without the aid of musical notation and an array of technical terms that would be out of place here; for this I would refer the reader curious in such matters to the admirable critique on the Fantastic Symphony in Robert Schumann’s Collected Writings. All that I aim at is to give, as well as may be, a description of this great work of Berlioz’s, together with the incidents in the composer’s life with which it is intimately connected.

In the second movement (headed A Ball) the youthful dreamer sees a vision of his love in the midst of a gay crowd in a ball-room. This movement, being in triple (waltz) time, may be called the scherzo by those who are anxious to preserve the symphonic nomenclature. It begins with a soft rustling of the violins in A-minor, the basses murmuring an accompanying figure, while the harps throw out scintillating arpeggios that affect the ear much as the many-colored sparkle of rich jewels affects the eye. Soon the dance begins, — the daintiest, gracefullest waltz melody in A-major, sung by the violins, and gradually adorned with all that exquisite orchestral coloring of which Berlioz stands the acknowledged master. Suddenly the Fixed Idea appears in F-major, forming the trio of the scherzo. The beloved object has come to be queen and reigning beauty of the festival; the other dancers stand still as her graceful form glides through the undulations of the waltz, the cynosure of all eyes. But presently scraps of the first waltz theme are woven into the accompaniment as couple after couple join again in the dance, until at length the whole orchestra jubilantly takes up the theme, and the Fixed Idea is lost sight of amid the brilliant throng. The glad noise of the fête is at its height when the first few bars of the Fixed Idea are given out softly by the clarinets, as if the dreamer had just caught a far-off glimpse of his beloved leaving the hall; the dance goes on, faster and faster; the laughter and merriment grow more and more bewildering; a whirling coda brings the movement to a close.

The third movement (adagio, Scene in the Fields, in F-major) is a delicious pastoral. The unhappy lover seeks repose for his sore heart in the quiet of the country. The movement begins with a pastoral dialogue between the Englisbhorn (in the orchestra) and the oboe (behind the scenes), as of two shepherds calling to and answering each other on their pipes. After a few measures of this duet, a beautiful cantabile melody is sung by the violins and flute in unison, wholly without accompaniment at first, but after a while the various instruments of the orchestra add their voices in rich, tender harmonies. This adagio, which may be accounted as one of Berlioz’s finest inspirations, is full of those imitations — suggestions would perhaps be a better word — of country sounds which the experienced concert-goer has learned to expect in every piece of pastoral music. The scene being this time laid in the fields and not in the woods, there is little of that tremulous background of rustling leaves which most composers seem to regard as a sine qua non in this class of writing; only once or twice do we hear the sough of the breeze through the distant pines, but the traditional singing birds, thunder-storm, and other familiar rural items are palpably there.

Yet all the bird-like notes have a thematic significance; they are an organic part of the whole picture; and we find no trace of puerile trickery in the manner in which they are employed. Of course, in this class of composition great demands are consciously made upon the listener’s imaginative faculty. Whether this fact should be accounted as redounding to the credit or discredit of a musical work from a purely æsthetic point of view is not my present purpose to discuss; but accepting the composer’s intention as laudable, and listening to this adagio in sympathy with the spirit in which it was written, we are struck by one point with singular force. I know of no piece of orchestral writing that so strongly suggests summer heat as the first half of this movement. The air is actually oppressive; the manner in which this sultry effect of the music is made to disappear after the thunder-storm will be called ingenious by some, and a happy poetic inspiration by others; the atmosphere of the second part of the movement is as cool and refreshing as that of the first part is hot and close. But the change is purely physical; the character of the music is ineffably sad throughout; the physical oppressiveness of the first part is cleared up only to give way to the moral dejection—the poignant grief of a mind overcharged with bitter memories — that pervades the second. The Fixed Idea appears once more, and weaves its persistent melody into the harmonious web, until it seems to gain sole possession of the dreamer’s mind; he becomes unconscious of all surrounding objects, and gives himself up unresisting to the intensity of his sorrow. In the last few measures we come to the first striking innovation that Berlioz intro duced into the orchestra of his day. The English horn repeats detached fragments of its pastoral melody, this time unan swered by the oboe, the only accompaniment being long, dull rolls on four kettle-drums, so tuned as to admit of the more or less complete formation of actual chords. The effect is striking and singularly poetic. Of the impression produced by this movement upon the performers and a small coterie of music-lovers who were present at a rehearsal of the symphony in Weimar,¹ Berlioz writes: —

“ I remember the effect of the first movement (Reveries — Passions) and of the third (Scene in the Fields). The latter, especially, seemed in its peroration to have oppressed every breast, and after the last roll of thunder, at the end of the solo of the forsaken shepherd, when the orchestra coming in seems to breathe one deep sigh and then expire, I heard those near me sigh in sympathy, and exclaim,” etc.

In these first three movements we have had passionate love depicted in all its phases: vague, dreamy desire; joyful hope; adoration; melancholy; despair. But now the picture changes: we come to the sinister, the terrible, at last even to the grotesque and horrible. The dream becomes a nightmare. The young lover has killed his mistress in an access of uncontrolled rage, and sees himself led to execution.

The fourth movement (March to the Scaffold, in G-minor and B-flat major) is perhaps the most famous and generally admired in the symphony. The orchestra is formidably increased; trombones, ophicleides, and tubas add their brazen voices to the rest. This superb march is built up of two themes: the one sombre, sinister, a sort of choral melody treated contrapuntally with great skill and power; the other full of chivalric splendor, with something terrible and appalling in its very brilliancy. The use of the orchestra is masterly. Just before the fatal axe falls upon the neck of its victim, the Fixed Idea appears again; a clarinet and flute give out the first phrase of the lovely melody; then comes a crash, a moment of impressive silence, and the whole orchestra answers with a roar on the full chord of G-major that recalls to one’s mind Carlyle’s description of the howling of the populace on the Place Nationale when Louis Capet’s head fell.

In the fifth movement (A WalpurgisNight’s Dream, in C-minor, finally in C-major) we have Berlioz at his devilmost. Although he had an innate abhorrence of the forms that French art commonly assumed in his day, and the idols of his art worship — Shakespeare, Dante, Virgil, Beethoven, Gluck, Von Weber, Spontini, Meyerbeer — were not of his country, he was thoroughly French in spirit and instinct, perhaps the most radically French of all Frenchmen, and when he dealt in the horrible he always gave generous measure.

In the last movement of the Fantastic Symphony the troubled dreamer sees his own damned soul in the midst of a demoniac crowd of witches and lost spirits, taking part in all the wild revelry of their Sabbath. The Fixed Idea is there too, but how changed. The haughty fair one comes, now shorn of her maiden purity, to join in the devilish sport; the spotless virgin has become a common courtesan; the lovely, passionate melody is degraded to an ignoble dance tune, played by a squeaking E-flat clarinet and octave flute to the accompaniment of grunting arpeggios on the bassoons; shrieks of delight greet her coming. From this point the movement is a perfect musical pandemonium. There is a fugued dance of demons, a Dies irœ given out in severe unison by the ophicleides and bassoons, and horribly burlesqued, verse by verse, by the other instruments, great bells in C and G tolling a solemn funeral knell the while. The dance grows wilder and wilder; the fugued rondo of the demons and the solemn Dies iræ are brought into conjunction; shrieks, groans, ribald laughter, fill the air; at last the whole mad rabble join in a furious chorus, which now and then recalls in a frightfully parodied form the once pure and beautiful Fixed Idea, when with a loud clash of cymbals the dreamer awakes. The Fantastic Symphony is ended.

This symphony was written out and even performed (at the Conservatoire in 1830) before the second part, Lélio, was begun. But Berlioz altered much of it afterwards, and it was not wholly in its present shape even when given in 1832. The March to the Scaffold was written in a single night. On the other hand the Scene in the Fields gave the composer much trouble; he worked at it for three weeks without being able satisfactorily to fix his idea; and of all the movements in the symphony this was the one that underwent the most serious changes in the process of retouching,—a process which Berlioz continued during several years. After the first performance, he rewrote the instrumentation of the ball scene from beginning to end, and also added a new coda.

The text of Lélio is, upon the whole, the most questionable of Berlioz’s productions; the greater part of the work is spoken prose monologue; the young artist soliloquizes, now upon the passion of love, now upon the art of music. There is an abundance of striking thought both in the love rhapsodies and the purely æsthetic reflection; indeed there never was lack of high intellectual quality in anything that Berlioz ever did, either in a literary or a musical way; but he was young when he wrote it; he had had little practical literary drilling, and, from his ignorance of the English and German languages, his studies in Shakespeare and Goethe had to be carried on through the medium of French translations, the quality of which has become proverbial. With naturally keen poetic instincts, he had not yet learned how to distinguish sublimity from bombast in the matter of poetic expression. His innate tendency toward the intense often carried him away. On the other hand, one is sometimes astonished at the utterly business-like tone his writing assumes so soon as he discusses any question that pertains specially to music. Lélio passes with the most astounding rapidity from impassioned rhapsodizing to the most undramatic, dry technicalities; he often stands over the art of music, scalpel in hand, as it were, with all the coolness of an anatomical demonstrator. Berlioz had, as all true artists must have, a thorough appreciation of the value of the technique, the mechanical part, of his art. The technical means were immediately poetized in his mind by the poetic end they were intended to compass; the symbol was to him almost synonymous with the thing symbolized; and often when he seems to the superficial reader to be talking merely of oboes, clarinets, harmonics, suspensions, and other tools and terms of his trade, his own mind is dwelling the while on the most sublime and sacred mysteries of his art. Yet the introduction of such a style of æsthetic writing into a dramatic monologue cannot but be looked upon as out of place. Berlioz has been much more artistically successful in symbolizing some of Lélio’s thoughts and mental conditions by means of music than he has been in expressing them in spoken words. The monologue is interrupted at times by music from behind the scenes, — bits of harmony and melody which are the incarnation in tones of the silent thoughts that flit through the young artist’s brain. These musical numbers of Lélio are: Goethe’s Fisherman, a charming ballad for a high tenor voice with piano-forte accompaniment, supposed to be sung by Lélio’s friend Horatio in the adjoining room; a Brigands’ Song, for baritone solo, male chorus, and orchestra; the Æolian Harp a most delicious bit of soft, dreamy harmony for muted strings, harps, horn, and clarinet, which is pervaded by fragmentary reminiscences of the Fixed Idea; a Chorus of Spectres, with orchestra; and the Fantasia on the Tempest, which is supposed to be Lélio’s own composition, and the performance of which he conducts in person.

The Chorus of Spectres has two stories connected with it. The first is as characteristic of Berlioz as it is of the state of musical feeling and academic habits of the Paris Conservatoire in 1829. I give it in his own words: —

“ The month of June coming round again reopened the lists of the Institute to me.² I had good hope of ending the business this time; the most favorable predictions came to me from all quarters. The very members of the musical section themselves hinted that I would surely get the first prize. Besides, I was now competing, I the laureate of the second prize, with students who had not yet obtained any mark of distinction, with simple commoners; and my position as a crowned head would give me a great advantage over them. By dint of hearing myself told that I was sure of my affair, I reasoned in the following unlucky way, — how illogically, experience soon taught me: ‘ Since these gentlemen have made up their minds beforehand to give me the first prize, I do not see why I should compel myself, as I did last year, to write in their style and according to their ideas, instead of writing in the style that is natural to my own personal feeling. Let me be an artist in earnest, and write a cantata that shall be really worth something.’

“ The subject that was given out to us to treat was Cleopatra after the battle of Actium. The queen of Egypt let the asp bite her, and died in convulsions. Before her suicide she addressed an invocation, full of religious terror, to the shades of the Pharaohs, asking them whether she, the dissolute and guilty queen, could be admitted into one of those giant tombs erected to the memory of a line of sovereigns illustrious by their glory and their virtue.

“ ‘ The idea to be expressed was grandiose. I had often musically paraphrased in thought the immortal monologue of Shakespeare’s Juliet, —

the sentiment of which approaches, on the side of terror at least, to that of the apostrophe put into the mouth of Cleopatra by our French rhymester. I had even the want of tact to place the English verse I have just quoted at the head of my score, in the form of a motto; and, in the eyes of Voltairian academicians like my judges, that was at the outset an unpardonable crime.

“I composed without difficulty the theme of a piece which seems to me of a grand character, in a rhythm that is striking from its very strangeness, of which the enharmonic progressions strike me as having a solemn and funereal sound, and of which the melody is dramatically developed in a slow, continuous crescendo. I have since used it, without changing a note, for the chorus (in unison and octaves) entitled Chorus of Spectres, in my lyric monodrama of Lélio.

“ I have heard it in Germany at my concerts; I know its effect well. The rest of the cantata has been wiped out from my memory, but this piece alone, I think, deserved the first prize. It consequently did not get it. No cantata did.

“ The jury preferred giving no first prize to encouraging by its vote a young composer who evinced such tendencies. The day after this decision I met Boïeldieu³ on the Boulevards. I will report our conversation word for word; it was too singular for me to have forgotten it.

“ As soon as he caught sight of me he said: ‘ Good heavens, my boy, what have you done! You had the first prize in your very hands, and you have thrown it away.’

“ ' Yet I did my best, sir, I assure you.’

“ ‘ That is just what we find fault with. You ought not to have done your best; you should have let well enough alone. How could I approve such things,—I who love above all things music that rocks me to sleep ? ’ . . .

“ ‘ It is rather hard, sir, to make music that shall rock you to sleep, when one happens to be a queen of Egypt, dying in moral and physical anguish, a prey to remorse and poisoned by the bite of a snake.’

“ ‘ Oh, I don’t doubt that you can justify yourself well enough; but that does not prove anything. You might have been graceful, at all events.’

“ ‘ Yes; the antique gladiators knew how to die gracefully but Cleopatra had not had their training. Besides, she did not die in public.’

“‘You exaggerate; we did not ask you to make her sing a contra-dance. What was the need of using such extraordinary harmoniecs in your invocation to the Pharaohs! ... I am no harmonist myself, and I admit that I could make neither head nor tail out of your chords from the other world.’

“ I bowed my head, not daring to answer, as sheer common sense prompted me to do, Is it my fault that you are not a harmonist?

“ ‘ And then,’ he went on, ‘ why did you put that rhythm that no one ever heard of before into your accompaniment ? ’

“ ' I did not think, sir, that we were bound to avoid new forms in composition, when we had the good luck to discover them, and they were appropriate.’

“ ‘ But, my dear fellow, Madame Dabadie, who sang your cantata, is an excellent musician, and yet it was plain that she needed all her talent and the strictest attention not to get out.’

“‘Faith, I did not know, I admit, that music was meant to be sung without talent and without attention.’

“ ' Well, well, you will never let me have the last word, I know. Good-by; take this lesson to heart for next year. Meanwhile, come and see me; we will have a chat together; I will cross swords with you, but as a chevalier français.'

“ And he went away, happy as a king at having ended with a stroke, as the vaudevillists say. To appreciate the merit of this stroke, which was worthy of Elleviou, one must know that, in delivering it at me, Boïeldieu made a sort of quotation from one of his own works (Jean de Paris), in which he has set the two italicized words to music.”

Berlioz got the first prize next year for his cantata of Sardanapalus (since destroyed), a distinction which carried with it an annual pension of a thousand crowns for five years, and the necessity of passing two years at the Académie de France in Rome, and three years in Germany.

The second incident connected with the Chorus of Spectres is this: —

Berlioz, having completed his Lélio in Rome, desired to have the chorus parts of the work copied out. The Chorus of Spectres was the occasion of some trouble with the papal authorities. The text of this chorus was written in the unknown⁴ tongue, the language of the dead, incomprehensible to the quick. When he applied for permission to have it printed, these words sung by the spectres greatly disturbed the government philologians. What was this language, and what could these strange words mean? The authorities were in a pretty fix. They fetched a German, who could make nothing of the text; and then an Englishman, who was no luckier; the Danish, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Irish, and Bohemian interpreters were equally at a loss to discover the sense. At last one of the censors, after profound reflection, hit upon an argument, the justice of which struck his colleagues at once. Since neither the English, Russian, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Irish, nor Bohemian interpreters could understand this mysterious language, it wats highly probable that the Roman people would not understand it either; so that it would be safe to authorize the publication, without fear of endangering the public morals or religious faith. It was accordingly printed.

The Brigands’ Song is a vigorous, fiery bit of writing, as far as the music is concerned. The text shows how nearly a Frenchman can lash himself up to the pitch of delirium furens, when he once throws the reins upon the neck of his imagination, and rides in the direction of the horrible. Two stanzas will give an adequate notion of this bloodthirsty effusion: — The Dramatic Fantasia on the Tempest was written immediately after the Fantastic Symphony and before the rest of Lélio. It is an alternately graceful and grotesque composition, according as the chorus sings of Miranda or of Caliban. It is full of brilliant and original orchestral effects, such as Berlioz alone knew how to produce. The introduction of two piano-fortes for four hands into the orchestra is one of the more striking peculiarities of the score. The text is in Italian. Just as the Fantasia ends, the violins give out the Fixed Idea for the last time; the beloved image is not to be effaced from the young artist’s memory; for good or for evil it is destined to haunt him sleeping and waking through life.

Whew!

If Lélio, the unhappy lover, is Berlioz himself, who then is the beloved object, the Fixed Idea? None other than Henrietta Constance Smithson, the English (or Irish, for she was born in Ennis, Ireland) actress, the Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona, who in 1828 first brought Shakespeare face to face with the Paris public.

Berlioz’s love for Miss Smithson was as intense as it was sudden: he saw her in Ophelia at the Odéon, and from that moment he loved her to distraction. It has been reported that, on leaving the theatre after seeing her in Juliet, he said, “ I will make that woman my wife, and write my greatest symphony on that drama.” Of which report Berlioz himself writes, “ I did both things, but I never said anything of the sort.” He married his Fixed Idea in 1833, and wrote the symphony here referred to ⁵ in 1838.

Miss Smithson first saw him at a rehearsal of an entertainment, got up at the Opéra - Comique for the benefit of an actor named Huet; she was to appear in two acts from Romeo and Juliet, and an overture of Berlioz’s was to be played by the orchestra as a mere musical make-weight. The two did not really meet face to face, but she must have been impressed with something uncanny in Berlioz’s admiring gaze as he followed her performance with eager eyes from one of the boxes, for, on finishing her part of the rehearsal, she asked one of the actors to “look after that young man, whose eyes boded no good.”

Berlioz wrote her a number of letters, probably in a sufficiently frantic vein, for all but the first were returned to him unopened. All this happened before the Fantastic Symphony was begun. He was first formally introduced to her after the performance of the whole of An Episode in the Life of an Artist in 1832. She was present at the concert. It happened in this wise.

When Berlioz came back from his two years’ stay in Rome, with his completed score in his portfolio, Miss Smithson was making her second professional visit to Paris. Her former visit had been an almost unprecedented success; the whole romantic school of French poets, whose war-cry at that time was Shakespeare, and the entire Paris press were literally at her feet; the frenzies of admiration that Shakespeare’s plays and her acting excited were almost without parallel in the annals of the Paris stage up to that time. But on her return to the French capital, four years afterward, she found the aspect of affairs miserably changed. Shakespeare was no longer a novelty, and had consequently lost all interest in the eyes of the general Parisian public. The romanticists, who had been at first overjoyed at being able to bring the people face to face with so convincing an argument against the pedantry and polite artificiality of the classic French drama of Racine and Corneille, were by no means so well pleased at the prospect of having such gigantic creations as Hamlet and Othello brought too often into immediate juxtaposition with their own productions; they now feared Shakespeare as much as they had previously admired him. Miss Smithson’s second venture was consequently a complete fiasco. Instead of being the sovereign idol of enthusiastic crowds, she now saw herself surrounded by an utterly unappeasable army of hungry creditors, with fell bankruptcy staring her in the face. Even Berlioz himself, occupied with the preparations for his concert, and fearing the influence of Shakespeare and Miss Smithson’s acting upon his too excitable and morbidly sensitive organization, did not go to the theatre. But one morning, being by chance in Schlesinger’s music shop, he happened to ask Schlesinger, from simple curiosity, the name of a certain gentleman who had just stepped out. It was Schutter, one of the editors of Galignani’s Messenger. Schlesinger, having some inkling of Berlioz’s feelings toward Miss Smithson, suddenly exclaimed, “ Give me a box. Schutter knows Miss Smithson, and I will ask him to take her your tickets, and persuade her to come to your concert.” Berlioz was not slow to jump at such a proposal. The ruse succeeded to perfection, and the parties engaged in the plot carried out their tactics so well that the unsuspecting actress was comfortably seated in her stage - box (having been inveigled thither on the plea of the music’s possibly distracting her mind from her devouring business troubles) before she knew that Berlioz had anything to do with the concert. She even then remembered his name only as that of the young madman who had beset her with frantic letters several years before. But the strange programme of the symphony attracted her attention, and as the performance went on she began to suspect that the young composer “ whose eyes boded no good ” might not have got over his wild love for her so soon as she had thought probable.

At last, when in Lélio the actor Bocage (who recited the prose monologue) came to the passage, “ Oh, why can I not find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia that my heart calls to? ” etc., she could no longer doubt that the Fixed Idea of the monodrama and herself were one and the same person. Admiration, especially such manifestly sincere homage as Berlioz’s, was more welcome to her then, plunged in debt and abandoned by the public as she was, than four years before, when she could afford to slight the ardent young musician’s passion, having the bravas and dithyrambics of all Paris at her beck. The seeds of her love for her future husband were sown on that evening.

But while this little love drama was silenlly going on in one part of the old Conservatoire concert room, another of a far different sort took place in one of the opposite boxes. Berlioz’s Episode in the Life of an Artist not only helped win him his wife, but made him one of the most pertinacious and powerful enemies that his not too happy career was cursed with.

While yet a student at the Conservatoire, Berlioz used to eke out his meagre income by correcting proofs for the music publisher, Troupenas. Among the very few persons authoritatively connected with the art of music who at that time gave him much public encouragement, the redoubted critic Fétis stood conspicuous. Fétis announced publicly that Berlioz’s appearance in the field as a composer was to be hailed as an event of no mean importance. He was, unfortunately, engaged in editing a French edition of Beethoven’s symphonies, in the text of which he allowed himself to make the most impertinent corrections. As luck would have it, some of the proofs were sent to Berlioz to revise. He, the prime maxim of whose faith was, “ Art before everything,” and to whom the text of Beethoven’s symphonies was sacred, expressed himself in very strong terms about the liberties Fétis had taken with it. He even said to Troupenas, apropos of the well-known suspended Eflat with its ascending resolution in the andante of the C-minor symphony, which Fétis had changed to F just before its rise to E-natural: —

“ Monsieur Fétis insults Beethoven and common sense. His corrections are criminal. The E-flat he wishes to strike out from the andante of the C-minor symphony is magical in its effect ; it is famous in every orchestra in Europe. M. Fetis’s F is a platitude. I warn you that I will denounce the unfaithfulness of your edition and M. Fétis’s doings before all the musicians of the Société des Concerts and of the Opéra, and that your professor will very soon get the treatment he deserves of all who respect genius and despise pretentious mediocrity.”

He not only said it, but did it, and Fétis found a perfect nest of hornets buzzing around his ears before he was forty-eight hours older. Not the least exasperated man was Habeneck, the leader of the Conservatoire orchestra; the indignation was so general among musicians that Troupenas was forced to expunge the corrections from his edition. It may be well imagined what a state of mind Fétis was in at all this hubbub, and how he cursed the “ingratitude” of the young musician whose compositions he had so kindly praised. But if he was furious before, his rage was blown to a white heat on the eventful evening of Berlioz’s concert (December 9, 1832) when he heard Bocage deliver the following passage of monologue point-blank at the box in which he was seated:—

“ But the most cruel enemies of genius are the sad dwellers in the Temple of Routine, fanatical priests who would sacrifice at the altar of their stupid goddess the most sublime new ideas, if it were only given them ever to have any; those young theorists of fourscore who live in the midst of an ocean of prejudice, and imagine that the world ends with the shores of their island; those old libertines of every age who command music to caress them, to divert them, fancying that the chaste muse can have no nobler mission; and, above all, those profaners who dare to lay sacrilegious hands upon original works, drag them through the ordeal of horrid mutilations which they call corrections and improvements, saying the while that to do such things needs much taste. Anathema upon them! They perpetrate a ridiculous outrage upon art! They are to be likened to the vulgar birds that populate our public gardens, perch proudly upon the fairest statues, and, when they have befouled the brow of Jove, the arm of Hercules, or the breast of Venus, arrogantly strut about in their flaunting plumage, self - satisfied as if they had laid a golden egg.”

This tirade was received with a whirlwind of applause and laughter by the members of the orchestra, who understood the allusion, especially as Boeage had very neatly mimicked Fétis’s voice at the words “ needs much taste.”

Fétis was seated in one of the most prominent seats in the hall. He and Berlioz were at swords’ points ever afterwards.

Such were the events connected with the composition and first performance of An Episode in the Life of an Artist, which Berlioz wrote to commemorate his love for her who afterwards became his wife, — a love which misfortune, incompatibility of character, perhaps unkind fate, — who shall say ? — were destined too soon to turn to bitterest gall. Even the opening theme of the symphony was stolen, as it were, from an earlier love, which in the end proved the stronger and purer of the two, though it was never returned in this world. Henrietta Berlioz-Smithson was laid in her grave before it blossomed out again in its full radiance in Berlioz’s heart.

William F. Apthorp.