Héctor, you’ve surpassed yourself. That’s superb. Berlioz’s use of the female voice often moves me to tears -- for some mysterious reason. Has anyone read a biography, or any of his writings -- according to
Wiki he was a substantial music critic and wrote a spicy Mémoires...
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As his fourth cantata for submittal to the Prix de Rome neared completion, the July Revolution broke out. "I was finishing my cantata when the Revolution broke out," he recorded in his Mémoires, "I dashed off the final pages of my orchestral score to the sound of stray bullets coming over the roofs and pattering on the wall outside my window. On the 29th I had finished, and was free to go out and roam about Paris 'till morning, pistol in hand".
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During his stay in Italy, he received a letter from the mother of his fiancée informing him that she had called off their engagement. Instead her daughter was to marry Camille Pleyel (son of Ignaz Pleyel), a rich piano manufacturer. Enraged, Berlioz decided to return to Paris and take revenge on Pleyel, his fiancée, and her mother by killing all three of them. He created an elaborate plan, going so far as to purchase a dress, wig and hat with a veil (with which he was to disguise himself as a woman in order to gain entry to their home).[31] He even stole a pair of double-barrelled pistols from the Academy to kill them with, saving a single shot for himself.
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I am in my 61st year; past hopes, past illusions, past high thoughts and lofty conceptions. My son is almost always far away from me. I am alone. My contempt for the folly and baseness of mankind, my hatred of its atrocious cruelty, have never been so intense. And I say hourly to Death: ‘When you will’. Why does he delay?
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Harriet Constance Smithson (1800-1854)
Berlioz’s first wife
Berlioz first saw Harriet Smithson in September 1827 at the Théâtre de l’Odéon playing in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, in the roles of Ophelia and Juliet respectively. They married on 3 October 1833 at the British Embassy in Paris. Berlioz always called her Henriette; she was his Ophelia.
29-09-08, 10:23 PM
