French Romanticism found its most fervent and untamed creative spirit in Berlioz, whose abundant and strikingly original body of work left a lasting mark on music across the nineteenth century. Early on, he formed a deep attachment to both musical and literary realms during childhood. Arriving in Paris at seventeen for medical training, he became captivated by Gluck’s operas and resolved to devote himself to composition. Once his father gave uneasy approval, he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire in 1826. Signs of his distinctive voice already emerged, both striking and unsettling; the 1829 competition cantata Cléopâtre marks his first extended masterpiece, and he captured the Prix de Rome in 1830 while the July Revolution unfolded around him. In September 1827, a production of Hamlet with Harriet Smithson portraying Ophelia sparked an all-consuming yet unreturned passion whose reverberations appear in the Symphonie fantastique of 1830.
After returning from Rome, Berlioz mounted a concert in 1832 that included the symphony. Harriet Smithson attended, and days afterward they met; the couple married on October 3, 1833. For more than ten years thereafter he followed a steady routine of journalism, concert organization, and composition, producing a sequence of visionary works: Harold en Italie (1834), the vast Requiem (1837), and the opera Benvenuto Cellini (1838), which suffered a disastrous premiere. Late that year the ailing Paganini bestowed 20,000 francs on Berlioz, freeing him to spend nearly twelve months writing the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839). To mark the tenth anniversary of the July Revolution he then completed the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840).
Opening the following decade, the iridescently orchestrated Les nuits d’été offered six refined settings of Gautier poems. Personal life brought little contentment as his marriage faltered. Extensive tours took him to Brussels, numerous German cities, Vienna, Pesth, Prague, and London throughout most of the 1840s. While traveling he finished La Damnation de Faust and presented it to a sparsely attended Paris audience on December 6, 1846; the financial losses proved severe until a profitable Russian tour rescued him.
He remained in London through the 1848 revolutionary disturbances and returned to Paris in July. The large-scale Te Deum, conceived as a companion to the Requiem, was written mainly in 1849 though it waited until 1855 for its premiere. L’Enfance du Christ achieved immediate and lasting success at its debut on December 10, 1854. Election to the Institut de France in 1855 brought a regular stipend that eased his finances and allowed full concentration on the crowning achievement of his career, the monumental opera Les Troyens drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid. The score reached completion in 1858. While awaiting its staging he fashioned a comic version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which enjoyed an enthusiastic première in Baden on August 9, 1862. Only acts three through five of Les Troyens reached the stage at the Théâtre-Lyrique, opening successfully on November 4, 1863 and running twenty-one times; this truncated presentation resulted from a compromise the composer later bitterly regretted.
Though weakened by illness, Berlioz led performances of his music in Vienna and Cologne during 1866 and journeyed to St. Petersburg and Moscow in the winter of 1867–1868. Despite despondency and inner turmoil he received an enthusiastic reception in Russia. Back in Paris by March 1868 he had become little more than a shadow of himself as paralysis gradually claimed him.
