‘They’re finally going to play my music’

According to his friend and fellow-composer Ernest Reyer, the last words Berlioz spoke on his deathbed were: ‘They are finally going to play my music’. It has taken time, but he was right. A century and a half later, Berlioz 150 is the watchword of the hour. That is as it should be. Berlioz was a devotee of the ancient world (‘I have spent my life with that race of demi-gods’), where it was believed that at the moment of death one might be granted foreknowledge of the future.

Why has it taken so long? In his native France there were plenty of reasons. As a forceful, witty but sardonic music critic he inevitably put Parisians’ backs up with his attacks on modern Italian music, which he regarded as frivolous, formula-ridden and fatally undramatic. That alone would have made the powerful Parisian musical establishment his enemies. His concerts attracted a band of admirers, but many others disliked his music before they had heard a note of it.

That music, innovatory, unorthodox, inspired by the example of Beethoven to reach into the future but also, disconcertingly, deriving from the long-breathed melodic lines of Gluck, was in any case alien to a musical society where Rossini and Donizetti and their mediocre imitators ruled the roost. Germany, Russia, England were open-minded enough to take an interest in Berlioz’s music, but France! As he wrote in his Memoirs, ‘What the Devil was the good Lord thinking of (‘Où diable le bon dieu avait-il la tête’) having him born there?’ He didn’t fit into any recognisable category. He was a paradox. Unlike so many Parisian critics, he never took bribes. What kind of man was that? Characteristically, his influential Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration was a mixture of scientific precision and poetic flights of fancy. The entry on the clarinet, for instance, went into minute technical detail about the instrument but at the same time extolled it as the voice of heroic love and the great women of antiquity.