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Young Berlioz Revealed: A Lost Early Composition Comes to Light
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11673 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1994 |
2,780 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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Hector Berlioz had a habit of burning things. The incendiary French Romantic touched a match to Troy in his opera The Trojans; he fanned the flames of perdition in The Damnation of Faust; and he brought his own generation to a Romantic blaze in the Symphonie Fantastique. Unfortunately, he also set fire to many of his early compositions, including a mass from 1824--his first major work to have a public performance. There was no reason to doubt that the work was gone. Berlioz said so in his Memoirs (written in 1848, published in 1870), and that was that.
Until now. The story of how the Berlioz mass has been found, restored, and performed is a cause for rejoicing among the legions of Berlioz fans.
At the behest of his father, a doctor, Berlioz had reluctantly come to Paris in the fall of 1821 to study medicine. He assiduously attended to his duties. He passed his first medical exams in July 1822 and qualified for a second year of medical studies. However, as he later recorded in his Memoirs, he was leading a "double life": When not in the dissecting rooms he was either attending the opera or hungrily devouring the music scores by Gluck and Spontini that he found in the library of the Paris Conservatory. Music, always his first love, was consuming the young man. "An ecstasy possessed me. . . . I vowed . . . that in spite of father, mother, uncles, aunts, grandparents, friends, I would be a musician," he recalled. As biographer David Cairns writes, it was a crucial moment:
It was the first vital step in the long process of teaching himself to be a composer, turning him from an amateur into a serious student of music. Before, his attitude had been that of many another fanatic, intensified maybe but not essentially different . . . . Now he could put notes to these sounds; he could bring them down out of the air and lay them out in front of him.
Determined more than ever to become a musician, despite continued stiff resistance from his father, the eighteen-year-old Berlioz became a pupil of Jean-Francois Lesueur, at sixty-three a respected composer and teacher at the Conservatoire who in time became the young composer's most important mentor and a kind of second father. Over the next two years Berlioz abandoned his medical studies altogether to pursue composing. His focus on music was singular and intense. "I was completely overcome," he wrote after hearing music from Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride, "and was seized by such a trembling that I wept and broke out in a great sweat; my heart beat so violently that, having gone up to my room
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