"I Shall Succeed"

We challenge posterity to bear witness . . . we have maintained from the start that genius burned in this Frenchman . . But far be it from us to seek to impose our faith by force.

--Robert Schumann

Posterity, ever since Composer Schumann's day, has been listening to the huge resounding and romantic symphonies of Hector Berlioz, and trying to decide just how good "this Frenchman" was. Today 81 years after his death, detractors of Berlioz still scorn him as a crude noisemaker who marshaled whole regiments of instruments and singers to gain his fantastically emotional effects, although most of them will grudgingly admit that he contributed some new colors to the palette of orchestration. His fervent admirers, even those who are troubled at the ease with which he passes from the sublime to the banal, claim that Berlioz was one of the giants of the romantic period--a composer who caught the heart beat of Beethoven, and went on to develop his own huge and powerful "narrative" (Symphonie Fantastique) and dramatic (Romeo and Juliet) symphonies.

Columbia University Professor Jacques Barzun is an earnest and erudite man who inclines with all his heart toward the second view. The result of his fervent admiration is a two-volume study, Berlioz and the Romantic Century (Little, Brown; $12.50), the most careful, comprehensive biography of a composer and his period since Ernest Newman's monumental four-volume Life of Richard Wagner.

Fish & Salt Water. Berlioz, like the hero of a Balzac novel, was a man who drove his way to fame through sheer determination. He was steered into medicine by his physician-father, but he hated it. When his parents opposed his musical career, Berlioz calmly wrote, "I shall succeed . . . There is no longer any point in being modest about this . . ."

He was far from modest in his first adult attempts at composing. At 21, he borrowed 1,200 francs from a friend to have a Berlioz-written Mass performed in Paris' Church of St.-Roch. After his first try for the Prix de Rome (he later won it), his father cut off his allowance in an attempt to force him back to medicine. Berlioz continued to compose, living sometimes only on raisins, salt and bread earned by singing in a Parisian theater, scribbling musical criticisms and giving guitar lessons.

His personal life was breathless and obsessive. He was continually in & out of love, twice halfheartedly attempted suicide to prove his devotion. His punishment for one clumsy attempt at sea, Hector told a friend, was "to swallow a lot of salt water and be yanked out like a fish . . ." He was married twice, both times unhappily; his only son Louis became a sailor, died two years before his famous father.

"I Am Going." Success as a composer first came to Berlioz when he was 26, with the huge work for which he is still best known, the Symphonic Fantastique. Franz Liszt, eternal friend of struggling composers, made a piano transcription of it, won more fame for Berlioz by playing it all over Germany and France. Eight years later, famed Violinist Nicolo Paganini knelt before Berlioz in public, to show his admiration for Harold in Italy, a Berlioz symphony which is almost a concerto for viola. More important for the impecunious Berlioz, Paganini made him a gift of 20,000 francs.

The success Berlioz wanted most came almost too late. As an operatic composer he won the respect of his contemporaries --Wagner, that "gay fat man" Rossini, Meyerbeer, Auber--but not the plaudits of the public. His Benvenuto Cellini flopped after four performances; the "concert opera" Damnation of Faust fell with a thud. When he was 59 and Beatrice and Benedict and The Trojans at Carthage had achieved a success, a friend remarked that people were finally coming to his operas. Replied the ailing Berlioz: "Yes, but I am going." Six years later, Berlioz was gone. At the end came an incident that seemed to typify the whole life of the emotional genius Hector Berlioz.

At his funeral, recounts Historian Barzun, "the pair of mourning-coach steeds, black and tame as Paris undertakers themselves, suddenly seized the bit in their teeth, plowed through the brass band in front of them, and brought Berlioz alone within the gates."

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