An Irish Diary

A cut above – An Irishman’s Diary on Hector Berlioz and medicine

Hector Berlioz: his accounts of dissection in the anatomy rooms catch some of the fevered and heightened sensibility of his music

Des O'Neill's face
Des O'Neill
Tue Sep 24 2019 - 18:59

The anniversaries of two giants of French music have attracted relatively little attention in Ireland. The Irish National Opera anticipated the bicentenary of Jacques Offenbach with a smart touring production last year of his only and posthumous opera, the Tales of Hoffmann. Exuberant operettas were more typical of his output: audiences in Northern Ireland were treated to two of these in August by the Northern Ireland Opera Studio.

Even less attention has been paid as yet to Hector Berlioz who died 150 years ago. A towering composer of notable individuality and vitality, Berlioz had a celebrated link with Ireland through his obsession with the Ennis-born actress, Harriet Smithson.

Berlioz's father both encouraged and circumscribed his musical education, supporting singing, guitar, and flute but barring him from keyboard and other string instruments

French theatre had been highly stylised and formal prior to the 1827 season of Shakespeare in English in Paris. The more natural and expressive style of the English company overcame the barrier of language to a remarkable extent, and Harriet in particular had taken Parisian audiences by storm with her performances as Ophelia and Juliet. She became his muse and subsequently wife and mother to his only son before disenchantment set in. With her career in decline, jealous of his success and struggling with the French language, they separated prior to her death at the age of 53. Another connection with Ireland was his setting of some of Thomas Moore’s poems in his Mélodies irlandaises. As the current exhibition in the Royal Irish Academy attests, Moore had an extraordinarily widespread appeal in contemporary European artistic and cultural circles.

A less well-known aspect of Berlioz’s formative influences was his immersion in medical school. His father was a respected doctor practising in a small town in the southeast of France and an early pioneer in acupuncture. Keenly aware of his son’s interest in music but desiring him to study medicine, he both encouraged and circumscribed his musical education, supporting singing, guitar, and flute but barring him from keyboard and other string instruments. This unusual aural and technical palette may have been a contributory factor in freeing Berlioz from conventional tropes in his highly original orchestration. Through a mixture of pressure and the inducement of a new flute, Berlioz was enrolled in the medical faculty, a prospect he did not welcome as recounted in his highly readable memoirs:“Become a doctor! Study anatomy! Dissect! Take part in horrible operations – instead of giving myself body and soul to music, sublime art whose grandeur I was beginning to perceive! Forsake the highest heaven for the wretchedest regions of the Earth, the immortal spirits of poetry and love and their divinely inspired strains for dirty hospital orderlies, dreadful dissecting room attendants, hideous corpses, the scream of patients, the groans and rattling breath of the dying! No, no! It seemed to me the reversal of the whole natural of my existence. It was monstrous. It could not happen. Yet it did.”

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The young Berlioz undertook four trimesters until student unrest closed the university in 1822, and had signed up for a fifth trimester but did not proceed with this. Although he plunged into the rich musical fabric of Paris, his accounts of dissection in the anatomy rooms catch some of the fevered and heightened sensibility of his music, from the March to the Scaffold in the Symphonie Fantastique to the darkness of the Damnation of Faust. A typical description ran: “When I entered that fearful human charnel-house, littered with fragments of limbs, and saw the ghastly faces and cloven heads, the bloody cesspool in which we stood, with its reeking atmosphere, the swarms of sparrows fighting for scraps, and the rats in the corners gnawing bleeding vertebrae, such a feeling of horror possessed me that I leapt out of the window, and fled home as though Death and all his hideous crew were at my heels.” In a lesson worth noting to parents of all generations, his father gave way eventually and Berlioz enrolled in the Conservatoire de Paris, carrying his experiences and memories of medical school into his music and a life of remarkable influence and success in music in Europe and beyond.

Thankfully this autumn will see a number of celebratory performances, starting with a performance of his recently discovered and adrenalin-packed Messe solennelle, and extracts from his Symphonie Fantastique, Damnation of Faust and other works in the National Concert Hall on October 3rd with Our Lady’s Choral Society, RTÉ Concert Orchestra and soloists under the distinguished direction of Proinnsias Ó Duinn.

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