Hector Berlioz facts for kids
Hector Berlioz was a famous French composer. He was born on December 11, 1803, in La Côte-St-André, France, and died in Paris on March 8, 1869. Berlioz was one of the most important composers of the 19th century. His music belongs to the Romantic period. This means it was full of strong feelings and often told a story or was inspired by ideas outside of music.
Berlioz was not great at playing any instrument himself. However, he was amazing at writing music for a large orchestra. Some of his most famous pieces include the Symphonie Fantastique, the opera Les Troyens (The Trojans), and the Grande messe des morts (a requiem). He was a very original composer. Many people did not fully understand his music until long after he died.
Contents
Berlioz's Life Story
Childhood and Student Days
Hector Berlioz was the oldest of six children. Only one brother and one sister lived to be adults. Hector loved them very much. His father was a doctor. The family lived in the countryside, near Grenoble.
Berlioz only went to school for a short time when he was ten. His father taught him most things at home. He loved French and Latin books. He also enjoyed reading travel books about faraway places. He learned to play the flute, the flageolet, and the guitar. He even read a book about harmony by Rameau. He never had a piano. Instead, he imagined the sounds of chords in his head. When he was just 12, he fell in love with an 18-year-old girl named Estelle. People often teased him about it. Around this time, he also started to compose music.
When Hector was 17, his father wanted him to become a doctor. But Hector wanted to study music. His father made him go to Paris to study medicine. Berlioz stayed in Paris for the rest of his life. He studied medicine for two years, but he hated it. One day, during an anatomy lesson, he had enough. He jumped out of the window and decided to study music instead. His father was very angry and stopped sending him money. Berlioz became very poor. He started writing about music for newspapers to earn money. This is how he made most of his living for the rest of his life. He also borrowed money from friends.
Berlioz often went to the Opéra. He especially liked the music of Gluck. He went to the library to study Gluck’s music scores. In 1822, he found a good teacher named Le Sueur. Le Sueur told Berlioz to stop publishing his music until he learned to compose better. In 1826, Berlioz officially became a student at the Conservatoire. He continued to study with Le Sueur and Reicha.
He tried four times to win an important music prize called the Prix de Rome.
- The first time, he wrote La Mort d’Orphée (The Death of Orpheus). The judges said it was too hard to play.
- The second time, he wrote Herminie. It had a tune he later used in his Symphonie fantastique.
- The third time, he wrote La mort de Cléopâtre. It was a wonderful piece, but he still did not win.
- The fourth time, he wrote La mort de Sardanapale, and he finally won the prize! Most of the music for this piece is now lost.
Berlioz did not understand any English. But he went to see Shakespeare’s Hamlet performed by an English theater group. The actress playing Ophelia was Harriet Smithson. Berlioz fell deeply in love with her, even though he did not know her. He started following her everywhere. Eventually, he married her. But the marriage was not very successful. Berlioz was truly in love with Ophelia, the character from Shakespeare’s play. He found it hard to love Harriet in real life.
Shakespeare’s plays became a huge inspiration for Berlioz. He wrote many works inspired by Shakespeare. These include Roméo et Juliette, Béatrice et Bénédict, and Roi Lear. He was also inspired by Goethe’s Faust and other writers like E.T.A. Hoffmann, Scott, and Byron. He also discovered the music of Beethoven. This helped him learn how to structure large musical pieces.
Berlioz became very busy putting on concerts of his music in Paris. He was quickly becoming known as a very original young composer. Winning the Prix de Rome gave him money for a while. But he was supposed to go to Rome. Berlioz did not want to go. He said he had plenty of work in Paris. The real reason was probably that he was in love with a 19-year-old girl named Camille Moke.
The 1830s: Travel and Marriage
Berlioz spent 15 months in Rome. On his way there, he visited his parents. They seemed to have forgiven him for not studying medicine. They were now proud of his success. In Italy, Berlioz did not write much music. He did not like Italian music or art. But he was inspired by the countryside, the sun, the sea, and the people he met. These included sailors, peasants, sculptors, and travelers. He did not like the city of Rome, but he did like Florence. He hated the Villa Medici, where he had to stay. When he traveled, he wrote some music.
When he heard that Camille Moke now loved another man, he became furious. He left Rome to go back to Paris and kill them both. However, when he reached Nice, he calmed down and changed his mind. He then returned to Rome.
After his time in Italy, he went back to Paris, visiting his parents again. He started organizing concerts of his music. This is when he got to know Harriet Smithson. They had a strange relationship, and he married her in 1833. The next year, they had a son. Their marriage was never easy. They had different personalities, were poor, and did not speak each other’s language. In 1842, they separated. Harriet died in 1854.
Some people thought Berlioz was an original composer. But many others thought his music was very strange. He earned almost no money from composing. Most of his money came from writing about music for newspapers, which he hated. When his works were performed, he usually conducted them himself.
He wrote a piece for viola and orchestra called Harold en Italie. The famous violinist Paganini had asked him to write it. But when Paganini saw the music, he did not like it. He thought it was not "showy" enough for the viola. Some years later, Paganini heard the work and decided he liked it. He paid Berlioz 20,000 Francs. This was a lot of money! It allowed Berlioz to spend time writing a big new work: Roméo et Juliette. When this was first performed, some critics thought Berlioz did not understand Shakespeare. However, Richard Wagner, who was in the audience, was very impressed.
Berlioz tried to be successful as an opera composer. But people did not understand his original music. He wrote a Grand symphonie funèbre et triomphale, which was first for a military band. Les nuits d'été is a very touching song-cycle.
Later Life and Legacy
During the 1840s and 1850s, Berlioz traveled a lot. He went to Germany, Austria, Russia, and England. He became more famous abroad than in his home country, France. However, he still returned to Paris often. The Germans loved his music and were impressed by his conducting. He rarely conducted music other than his own.
In 1846, he composed one of his best works: La Damnation de Faust. It was performed at the Opéra-Comique. But the opera house was half empty. This was a great disappointment for him. Berlioz continued to tour other countries where people appreciated him. He had great success in St Petersburg, and in Berlin, where he performed for the King of Prussia. He also had success in London. The English liked him very much.
In 1854, Harriet Smithson died. Seven months later, Berlioz married Marie Recio, a singer he had known for 12 years. Her Spanish mother came to live with them. She took very kind care of Berlioz in his last years when he was ill. Berlioz’s son, Louis, became a captain in the navy. He traveled all over the world. This was something Berlioz had always dreamed of since childhood, when he read travel books. Berlioz was terribly sad in 1867 when he heard that Louis had died in Havana from yellow fever.
Berlioz had always loved the Latin poet Virgil. In 1856, he spent a long time writing a long opera in five acts called Les Troyens (The Trojans). He knew it would be almost impossible to find anyone to perform it. It only became possible in 1863 after he divided the work into two parts. After that, it was 30 years before the opera was performed again. It contains some of his best music. The storm scene is especially famous and is often played separately as an orchestral piece.
As he got older, he became very focused on death. He had lost two wives, and his two sisters had also died. He started to walk in cemeteries. He wrote his Memoires, which is his autobiography. It has been translated into many languages, including English.
In 1863, he wrote to Estelle, the girl he had loved as a child. She was now a widow of 67, and he was 60. He visited her in Lyons and fell in love with her again. He wrote to her regularly for the rest of his life. He stayed with her three times in Grenoble, where she lived with her son. She gradually understood him better. She gave him much happiness during his last years.
A final trip to St Petersburg was too much for Berlioz. He became ill. He went to Nice on his way home. There, he collapsed twice while walking by the sea. He went back to Paris, where his mother-in-law cared for him. He died on March 11, 1869, and was buried in the Cimitière Montmartre.
Berlioz's Unique Music
Berlioz is a clear example of a "prophet who is without honor in his own country." Not many people in France realized he was a great composer. But in other countries, he was welcomed as one of the great composers and conductors of his time. Many of his works are hard to describe. His Symphonie fantastique is not quite a symphony. His Harold en Italie is not quite a concerto. His Requiem is not a normal, religious requiem. Roméo et Juliette is a mix of many different things. He wrote five operas, and they are all very different. His songs are gentle and lovely, influenced by French romance. His overtures are very popular at orchestral concerts.
His music is very original. Even though he wrote a book on orchestration (how to write for an orchestra), the sounds he created were so personal that no one could copy him. He was not good at playing any instrument. But he could imagine all the sounds in his head. Many of his melodies are very long and stretch over an unusual number of bars. A lot of his orchestral music is programme music. This means it is often inspired by books or wild stories from his imagination.
Images for kids
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Louis Berlioz, the composer's father c. 1840
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The Opéra, in the Rue le Peletier, Paris, c.1821
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Harriet Smithson as Ophelia
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Marie ("Camille") Moke, later Pleyel
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Poster for the premiere of Benvenuto Cellini, September 1838. Berlioz's name is not mentioned.
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Berlioz in 1845
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Marie Recio, later Berlioz's second wife
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Berlioz by Gustave Courbet, 1850
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Portrait by Pierre Petit, 1863
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Grave in Montmartre
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Opening of Béatrice et Bénédict overture, showing characteristic rhythmic variations
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Berlioz's use of col legno strings in the Symphonie fantastique: the players tap their strings with the wooden backs of their bows
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Idée fixe theme, Symphonie fantastique
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Les Troyens à Carthage (the second part of Les Troyens) at the Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique-Châtelet, 1892
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Berlioz's manuscript of the Requiem, showing the eight pairs of timpani in the Dies irae
See also
In Spanish: Hector Berlioz para niños
