Page 211 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

At the age of seventeen, Berlioz was sent off to Paris to study medicine, his father’s profession. For two years he pursued a program in the physical sciences, earning a degree in 1821. But Berlioz found the reality of the dissecting table repulsive and the allure of the opera house and concert hall irresistible. After a period of soul-searching, over the choice of a career, he vowed to become “no doctor or apothecary but a great composer.”
If you were a college student and told your parents you were switching from medicine to music, how would they react? Berlioz’s father did the predictable. He immediately cut off his son’s living stipend, leaving young Berlioz to ponder how he might support himself while studying composition at the Paris Conser- vatory (the French national school of music). Other composers had relied on teaching as a means to earn a regular income. But with no particular skill at any instrument, what music could Berlioz teach? Instead, he turned to music criti- cism, writing reviews and articles for literary journals. Berlioz was the first com- poser to earn a livelihood as a music critic, and it was criticism, not composition, that remained his primary source of income for the rest of his life.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Berlioz would turn to writing about music, for in his mind, a connection had always existed between music and the written word. As a student, Berlioz encountered the works of Shakespeare, and the experience changed his life: “Shakespeare, coming upon me unawares, struck me like a thun- derbolt. The lightning flash of that discovery revealed to me at a stroke the whole heaven of art.” Berlioz devoured Shakespeare’s plays and based musical compo- sitions on four of them: The Tempest, King Lear, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet. The common denominator in the art of both Shakespeare and Berlioz is range of expression. Just as no dramatist before Shakespeare had portrayed the full spec- trum of human emotions on the stage, so no composer before Berlioz, not even Beethoven, had undertaken to create such a wide range of moods through sound.
To depict wild swings of mood in music, Berlioz called for enormous or- chestral and choral forces—hundreds and hundreds of performers (see above, “Greater Size, Greater Volume”). He also experimented with new instruments: the ophicleide (an early form of the tuba), the English horn (a low oboe), the harp (an ancient instrument that he brought into the symphony orchestra for the first time), the cornet (a brass instrument with valves, borrowed from the military band), and even the newly invented saxophone. In 1843, he wrote a textbook on orchestration—the art of arranging a composer’s music for just the right instruments—still used today in colleges and conservatories around the world. The boy who could play only guitar had become a master of the orchestra!
Berlioz’s approach to musical form was equally innovative; he rarely used such standard forms as sonata–allegro or theme and variations. Instead, he preferred to create forms that flowed from the particular narrative of the story at hand. His French compatriots called his seemingly formless compositions “bizarre” and “monstrous,” and thought him something of a madman. Subscrib- ing to the adage “No man is a prophet in his own land,” Berlioz took his pro- gressive music to London, Vienna, Prague, and even Moscow, introducing such works as Symphonie fantastique and Romeo and Juliet. He died in Paris in 1869, isolated and embittered, the little recognition he received in his native France having come too late to boost his career or self-esteem.
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