Musicians of To-Day | Page 5

his walks in the rain, and by sleeping out-of-doors in all weathers, even when there was snow on the ground.[11]
[Footnote 8: "A passable baritone," says Berlioz _(Mémoires_, I, 58). In 1830, in the streets of Paris, he sang "a bass part" _(Mémoires_, I, 156). During his first visit to Germany the Prince of Hechingen made him sing "the part of the violoncello" in one of his compositions (_Mémoires_, II, 32).]
[Footnote 9: There are two good portraits of Berlioz. One is a photograph by Pierre Petit, taken in 1863, which he sent to Mme. Estelle Fornier. It shows him leaning on his elbow, with his head bent, and his eyes fixed on the ground as if he were tired. The other is the photograph which he had reproduced in the first edition of his _Mémoires_, and which shows him leaning back, his hands in his pockets, his head upright, with an expression of energy in his face, and a fixed and stern look in his eyes.]
[Footnote 10: He would go on foot from Naples to Rome in a straight line over the mountains, and would walk at one stretch from Subiaco to Tivoli.]
[Footnote 11: This brought on several attacks of bronchitis and frequent sore throats, as well as the internal affection from which he died.]
But in this strong and athletic frame lived a feverish and sickly soul that was dominated and tormented by a morbid craving for love and sympathy: "that imperative need of love which is killing me...."[12] To love, to be loved--he would give up all for that.
[Footnote 12: "Music and love are the two wings of the soul," he wrote in his _Mémoires_.]
But his love was that of a youth who lives in dreams; it was never the strong, clear-eyed passion of a man who has faced the realities of life, and who sees the defects as well as the charms of the woman he loves, Berlioz was in love with love, and lost himself among visions and sentimental shadows. To the end of his life he remained "a poor little child worn out by a love that was beyond him."[13] But this man who lived so wild and adventurous a life expressed his passions with delicacy; and one finds an almost girlish purity in the immortal love passages of Les Troyens or the "_nuit sereine"_ of _Roméo et Juliette_. And compare this Virgilian affection with Wagner's sensual raptures. Does it mean that Berlioz could not love as well as Wagner? We only know that Berlioz's life was made up of love and its torments. The theme of a touching passage in the Introduction of the Symphonic fantastique has been recently identified by M. Julien Tiersot, in his interesting book,[14] with a romance composed by Berlioz at the age of twelve, when he loved a girl of eighteen "with large eyes and pink shoes"--Estelle, _Stella mentis, Stella matutina_. These words--perhaps the saddest he ever wrote--might serve as an emblem of his life, a life that was a prey to love and melancholy, doomed to wringing of the heart and awful loneliness; a life lived in a hollow world, among worries that chilled the blood; a life that was distasteful and had no solace to offer him in its end.[15] He has himself described this terrible "_mal de l'isolement_," which pursued him all his life, vividly and minutely.[16] He was doomed to suffering, or, what was worse, to make others suffer.
[Footnote 13: _Mémoires_, I, 11.]
[Footnote 14: Julien Tiersot, _Hector Berlioz et la société de son temps_, 1903, Hachette.]
[Footnote 15: See the _Mémoires_, I, 139.]
[Footnote 16: "I do not know how to describe this terrible sickness.... My throbbing breast seems to be sinking into space; and my heart, drawing in some irresistible force, feels as though it would expand until it evaporated and dissolved away. My skin becomes hot and tender, and flushes from head to foot. I want to cry out to my friends (even those I do not care for) to help and comfort me, to save me from destruction, and keep in the life that is ebbing from me. I have no sensation of impending death in these attacks, and suicide seems impossible; I do not want to die--far from it, I want very much to live, to intensify life a thousandfold. It is an excessive appetite for happiness, which becomes unbearable when it lacks food; and it is only satisfied by intense delights, which give this great overflow of feeling an outlet. It is not a state of spleen, though that may follow later ... spleen is rather the congealing of all these emotions--the block of ice. Even when I am calm I feel a little of this '_isolement_' on Sundays in summer, when our towns are lifeless, and everyone is in the country; for I