The Berlioz problem

Hector Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803 in rural Isère. ‘During the months which preceded my birth my mother never dreamed, as Virgil’s did, that she was about to bring forth a laurel branch,’ he writes in his Memoirs. ‘This is extraordinary, I agree, but it is true… Can it be that our age is lacking in poetry?’ And so on, for nearly 600 candid, facetious, outspoken pages. Berlioz’s Memoirs are the inner voice of the Romantic generation as you’ve always imagined it, and everyone who’s interested in music in the 19th century — no, scrub that, everyone who’s interested in European culture — should read them.

As a composer, though, Berlioz is all or nothing: either blazing through the heavens on the wings of some utterly idiosyncratic inspiration, or bumping clumsily in the mud, trying and failing to look Olympian. Which one can depend upon the performance as much as the work, so it’s worth dragging even his loopiest creations out into the sunlight once every few years. To mark the 150th anniversary of his death the BBC spent last weekend doing just that, nowhere more quixotically than in Glasgow where the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Pascal Rophé performed The Death of Cleopatra and the even rarer Lélio, or The Return to Life.

Cleopatra bears the scars of its creation during the 1829 Prix de Rome — a state-run competition so officiously Gallic that merely reading Berlioz’s description is enough to make you suspect that we can never truly belong in Europe. Competitors were locked in cells and required to set a compulsory text under conditions seemingly designed to stunt youthful inspiration into academic conformity. Berlioz made the mistake of attempting to create an actual work of art, and the jury refused to award a prize.