Berlioz
Peter Quennell
Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson Peter Raby (Cambridge University Press £12.95)
Q hakespeare, whom Voltaire had once L/rudely dismissed, first conquered the imagination of 19th-century France in September 1827, when his genius was revealed by Harriet Smithson, a 27-year-old Irish actress, to audiences that included Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Theophile Gautier, Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Dumas pare, Delacroix and the young composer Hector Berlioz.
The atmosphere of the French creative world was then particularly impressionable. Since the great Napoleonic pageant had faded, 'we were living [wrote Gerard de Nerval, as he remembered his youth] in one of those strange periods which usually follow a revolution or the downfall of some mighty empire...composed of activity, dif- fidence and inertia, splendid Utopian dreams, philosophic or religious aspira- tions, vague enthusiasms, the whole inter- penetrated by certain instincts of renewal .
Though the Romantic Movement was well under way, it would not strike its most dramatic blow until, three years later, Hugo's bellicose disciples fought the famous Battle of Hernani and shouted down their classicist opponents. But, mean- while, even Parisian fashions had begun to show Romantic tendencies; and in 1827 La Belle Irlandaise inspired a surprising new coiffure, which consisted of a long black, gauzy veil and certain vagrant wisps of
straw threaded through the wearer's tresses. For it was as the mad Ophelia that Harriet Smithson especially stirred her audience, and was often painted and drawn by Delacroix, who also represented her, perhaps a shade less tenderly, as Desdemona and the expiring Juliet.
Among poets and novelists, the elder Dumas found not only Miss Smithson's performance, but the English company's entire presentation of Hamlet, extra- ordinarily appealing; The truth of dialogue — of which I understood not one word, I admit, but whose sense I could gauge just from the inflexions and intonations of the actors; the naturalness of the gestures...the relaxed postures which...suggested that the actors were so intent on the business in hand that they had forgotten the public's presence... and in the very cen- tre, tl1 poetry...all this overturned every tradition of the theatre...and allowed me to glimpse... that glittering summit where ideas, born of inspiration, could be enthroned.
A still more impassioned spectator was Berlioz, then 23, a wildly ambitious young man, whose hooked nose and overhanging shock of hair gave him the look, said Theophile Gautier, of an 'exasperated eagle'; and his simultaneous discovery of Shakespeare and Miss Smithson had a volcanic effect upon his mind and heart. 'Shakespeare... struck me like a thunder- bolt'; of the actress herself he became desperately enamoured. But she quietly kept her distance; and during the worst crisis of his unrequited love, he tells us in his Memoirs, he completely lost the gift of sleeping:
I recall only four occasions when I really slept... one night on some sheaves of corn among the stubble near Ville-Juif; once in a field outside Sceaux; once in the snow on the banks of the frozen Seine... and lastly at a table at the Cafe du Cardinal...where I slept for five hours to the great alarm of the waiters...
Yet Berlioz had a fiercely determined character; and on 3 October 1833 he even- tually wedded Miss Smithson at the British Embassy in Paris. It was a disastrous mar- riage. While Berlioz strode on from strength to strength, Harriet lost her talent, lost her health, grew stout and savagely jealous, suffered a succession of strokes, took, at length, to heavy drinking, and died, an almost unrecognisable phantom, in 1854. The pathetic story of her rise and fall has been graphically unfolded by Peter Raby, whose biography, entitled Fair Ophelia, contains some admirable illustrations, of which the best is an exquisite lithograph, produced in 1827, that depicts La Belle Irlandaise as Shakespeare's mad girl, wear- ing Ophelia's veil and crowned with straws.
Readers of Mr Raby's book will no doubt next turn to Berlioz's own Memoirs, one of the finest records of the emotional background of the French Romantic Move-
ment. David Cairns'S excellent translation is all the more easily enjoyed thanks to his scholarly preface, biographical glossary, erudite appendices and other learned ap- paratus. It is a huge book; Berlioz's text alone covers nearly 500 pages; but it seldom seems unduly long, though the memoirist's detailed account of his professional trium- phs and reverses, and what he himself describes as 'technical stuff about in- struments' is addressed to modern musicologists rather than to the ordinary reader.
Berlioz, however, usually succeeds in dramatising every episode that he in- troduces. For example, he dashes off this vivid picture of a performance that went sadly wrong: Ten million curses on all musicians who do not count their rests! In my score the horn was supposed to give the cue to the timpani, the timpani to the cymbals, the cymbals to the bass drum...But the ac- cursed horn-player failed to play his note. Without it the timpanist was afraid to come in...Absolutely nothing hap- pened ...a cry of horror burst from me. I hurled my score into the middle of the orchestra, and sent the two nearest desks flying. Mme Malibran started back as if a mine had exploded at her feet.
On the dramas of his private life Berlioz is always wonderfully communicative; and he chronicles his last, and possibly his greatest, love affair with tremendous energy and feeling. It had been a platonic affair. At the age of 12 he had first caught sight of a beautiful young woman named Estelle Duboeu f: This Estelle... was a girl of eighteen with a tall elegant figure, large eyes... a head of hair that would have graced Achilles's helmet ...And she wore pink half-boots... You may laugh, but although I have forgotten the colour of her hair (I believe it was black), I cannot think of her without seeing before me, dazzling as those great eyes of hers were, the little pink boots.
Soon afterwards, she married a prosaic M Fornier; and he had lost her, as he feared, for good. Then, in 1848 — he was already middle-aged — learning of her pre- sent whereabouts, and that she was now the widowed mother of a grown-up family, he wrote her an imploring letter. In 1864 she at last agreed to see him. They met; he beheld an 'aged, saddened, obscure woman', grey- haired, who wore spectacles and a widow's cap and 'knew nothing of my art'. Yet Mme Fornier remained his idol; 'my soul is hers as it will be to my dying day'. Balzac and Shakespeare themselves, he reflected, had never imagined that such a passion could exist; yet it had transfigured his existence; and with a solemn declaration of his strongest beliefs Berlioz brings his Memoirs to a close: 'Love or music — which power can uplift man to the sublimest heights?... Love cannot give an idea of music; music can give an idea of love. But why separate them? They are the two wings of the soul.'
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