Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Son of a provincial French doctor with a practice near
Grenoble, Berlioz was destined for the medical profession. However, after his
first year in Paris, he gave up medicine and became a music student instead,
learning to play the flute, the flageolet and the guitar. In 1823 he entered
the Paris Conservatoire, and a year later saw Charles Kemble and his company in
a production of Hamlet at the Odeon, where he fell violently in love with an
Irish actress, Harriest Smithson, who played Ophella. From this point on, his life, as related in
his own Memoirs, is that of an archetypal Romantic hero. Beset by financial
difficulties he was obliged to write reviews and articles to augment his
income, a task he loathed but did supremely well. The power and originality of
his music and the brilliance of his orchestration were not appreciated by his
contemporaries, and even today his genius is more widely recognized outside
France than it is within.
Berlioz’s Overture, “The Roman Carnival,” was composed as an
afterthought to serve as an introduction to the second act of his opera,
Benvenuto Cellini. It was completed in Paris in 1843 and was performed for the
first time under the direction of the composer at a concert in the Salle Herz, Paris,
on February 3, 1844.
The Overture is based on a reminiscence of Benvenuto
Cellini’s first act aria O Teresa, vous que j’aime” (‘O Teresa, whom I adore”)
and an anticipation of the lively saltarello which caused Berlioz and the
dancers such agonies during the rehearsals of the opera in September 1938.
Francois Antoine Habeneck, the conductor, was hostile to Berlioz, in part,
perhaps, because Berioz could not restrain his indignation at Habeneck’s
sluggishness. The opera was a resounding fiasco. Only the Overture, as Berlioz
assures us: “received exaggerated applause, but the rest was
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