Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803 – 1869) was a French
Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes
orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and
Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem
and L'Enfance du Christ, his three operas Benvenuto
Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and
works of hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony"
Roméo et Juliette and the "dramatic legend" La
Damnation de Faust.
The elder son of a provincial doctor, Berlioz was
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Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803 – 1869) was a French
Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes
orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and
Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem
and L'Enfance du Christ, his three operas Benvenuto
Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and
works of hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony"
Roméo et Juliette and the "dramatic legend" La
Damnation de Faust.
The elder son of a provincial doctor, Berlioz was
expected to follow his father into medicine, and he
attended a Parisian medical college before defying his
family by taking up music as a profession. His
independence of mind and refusal to follow traditional
rules and formulas put him at odds with the
conservative musical establishment of Paris. He briefly
moderated his style sufficiently to win France's
premier music prize – the Prix de Rome – in 1830,
but he learned little from the academics of the Paris
Conservatoire. Opinion was divided for many years
between those who thought him an original genius and
those who viewed his music as lacking in form and
coherence.
At the age of twenty-four Berlioz fell in love with the
Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, and he
pursued her obsessively until she finally accepted him
seven years later. Their marriage was happy at first
but eventually foundered. Harriet inspired his first
major success, the Symphonie fantastique, in which an
idealised depiction of her occurs throughout.
Berlioz completed three operas, the first of which,
Benvenuto Cellini, was an outright failure. The second,
the huge epic Les Troyens (The Trojans), was so large
in scale that it was never staged in its entirety
during his lifetime. His last opera, Béatrice et
Bénédict – based on Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado
About Nothing – was a success at its premiere but did
not enter the regular operatic repertoire. Meeting only
occasional success in France as a composer, Berlioz
increasingly turned to conducting, in which he gained
an international reputation. He was highly regarded in
Germany, Britain and Russia both as a composer and as a
conductor. To supplement his earnings he wrote musical
journalism throughout much of his career; some of it
has been preserved in book form, including his Treatise
on Instrumentation (1844), which was influential in the
19th and 20th centuries. Berlioz died in Paris at the
age of 65.
Berlioz's approach to harmony and counterpoint was
idiosyncratic, and has provoked adverse criticism.
Pierre Boulez commented, "There are awkward harmonies
in Berlioz that make one scream". In Rushton's
analysis, most of Berlioz's melodies have "clear tonal
and harmonic implications" but the composer sometimes
chose not to harmonise accordingly. Rushton observes
that Berlioz's preference for irregular rhythm subverts
conventional harmony: "Classic and romantic melody
usually implies harmonic motion of some consistency and
smoothness; Berlioz's aspiration to musical prose tends
to resist such consistency." The pianist and musical
analyst Charles Rosen has written that Berlioz often
sets the climax of his melodies in relief with the most
emphatic chord a triad in root position, and often a
tonic chord where the melody leads the listener to
expect a dominant. He gives as an example the second
phrase of the main theme – the idée fixe – of the
Symphonie fantastique, "famous for its shock to
classical sensibilities", in which the melody implies a
dominant at its climax resolved by a tonic, but in
which Berlioz anticipates the resolution by putting a
tonic under the climactic note.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Berlioz)
Although originally composed for Harmonium, I created
this Transcription of the Toccata from 3 Works for the
Harmonium (H 99) Arranged for Piano.