THE HEART OF A GENIUS

Shannon News, 16 March 1926, Page 4

THE HEART OF A GENIUS

BERLIOZ i AND lIIS FIERY LOVE AFFAIRS. . Love and music were the malsterpassions in the life of Hector Berlioz —Berlioz, the strangest spirit that ever love and. music has inspired (composer, of the ‘Damnation of Fauqt’>. And his love was like, his music, wild, titanic, a Pegasus that swept him through the thunder clouds with lightnings streaming from Its wings. He was a Romeo at thirteen —at sixty-one he was a Romeo dtill. Let us recall a few of his adventures in the regions of romance. The Sensitive Youth. Hector’s father was a doctor; his grandfather .was a country gentleman To the latter's house at Meylan used (to come a beautiful young girl of twenty, Estelle Duboeuf. With her fixe boy fell sick with love. His Jealousy .wats like a young Othello's. To see her, with her slender figure and bright eyes, dancing in her red shoes with a Lancer, was to him an agony that made him rush away into the woods until the beating of his heart had ceased to choke him. In due time she married and was lost to him, apparently for ever. But Estelle, his first love, as W 6 shall see, was destined, in the strangest way to be his last. Hector's father intended him to be a doctor like himiself. At eighteen (in 1S21) the youth was sent to Paris lor his studies. But the dissecting room so horrified him that he leaped out of the window, like a soul escaping out of hell. Thenceforward ho resolved to give his life to music. His father cut off his supplies, and Hec- . tor was reduced to keeping' himself by playing the guitar and singing in the chorus at a third-rate theatre. Irish Eyes.

i that time thei' was appearing on another stage a young Irish ae. tress by the name of Harriet Smith - son who wa's making a success as Juliet and Ophelia. Hector saw her, and his heart went u p in flames. He tried to mee,t her, but in vain. He wrote her the most ardent letters which the haughty beauty threw into the lire. In despair he turned for consolation to another chai'niei’, Camille Moke, a piano teacher, a winsome little lady, all smiles and dimples, with whom he swore eternal vows. She was his Ariel, his fairy; he was her Lucifer, her Satan. Her mother, whom he called th e hippo, potamus, /wa's not oyer-eager for a son-in-law without a penny. Moreover, at that moment Hector won the Prize pf Rome at the Conservatoire which required that he should spend three years in Rome. He nearly threw up all his prospects for the sake of starving by his charmer's side. But at last he |took farewell. Prom Rome lie wrote her 1 reams of ardent letters, but, to his despair,

there came no answer,. At la #> one fatal day, a leter reached him. The coquette ’ wa's married .to another man! , Then Hector , went stark crazy. A schomc, /too wild for fiction, seized his mind. He determined to disguise himself as a lady’s maid, in a skirt, hat and a green veil, with a pair of pistols in his corsage, and appear, unrecognised! in Paris. His plan was bread and simple; he meant to shoot the bride, her husband, her mother, and, last of all, himself, at one fell swoop. With this end he took the coach along the road of the Rivier#. Fortunately, by the time he reached the oorder his madness had a lucid interval. ‘ It was born e in upon him that a jilt, however lovely, is hardly worth three murders and a suicide. He threw away his skirt and veil, put the pistols in his pocket, and returned more or less in his right mind, to Rome, H

First marriage. , When, at the jixpiration of three years, he came again to Paris, Harriot Smithson,was still appearing, on the stage. But slie was no longer the proud beauty he had left behind.' She was failing; she was, to put it bluntly, getting fat —too rotudn ofr Juliet and Ophelia. Her audiences fell away; she was overwhelmed with debt; and last of all, in stepping from her carriage at the stage door, she fell and broke her ankle. When Berlioz, fierier than ever, sought to see her she no longer held him off. * TPbt it was some tim e befoe she yielded. There was something about Berlioz, with his eagle beak, . greajfc blazing tiger eves, and shock of scarlet hair, that worked on women like a wizard’s spell. It worked on Harriet and yet she wavered . The truth Is, she was afraid. To marry Hector was to be wedded to the whirlwind, to* “the tempest dropping fire.” The end came in a dramatic fashion, half tragedy, half farce. With a bottle of poison in his hand he threw himself before her, sworn to swallow it if she refused him, .and, when this "failed to shake her .poured the mixture down his throat. Then, in terror and compunction, she stammered out a promise. He gulped down an emetic, spent, in Shakespeare’s phrase, two hours in “violent hefts,’ recovered, and led his goddess to the altar. Well may one cry witli Gloucester, “Was ever woman in this humor won?”

This dream of Paradise was not to Harriett evolved into' a spitfire, while Berlioz was one already. The rift between them widened. Music became his whole existence. Slowly, he, won the recognition, if not by the general public, yet by his fellow-mas. ters— Paginini, Schumann, Lizt, and Wagner—as the greatest French composer of his time. The day came when he set out upon a concert tour * through Europe, and left Harriet behind—for ever.

Tlio Bad Angel. Alas, he,did not go alone... In his company, went Marie Riccio, a young actress with the face and figure of a goddess. “She makes every other woman on the stage,” he tells us, “look like a sack of apples on a stool.” This girl was Berlioz’s Bad angel. „ She was cursed with a .defect for which ; no charms, can dbmpensajte a belief that she could sing. At every concert she insisted on appearing, and her appearance invariably cleared the halls. Not all “the gorgeous storms of j music” which, like a Mephistopheles, he drew from his colos. sal orchestras could bring the lovers of these vast creations 'to the concert room. Anything rather than 1 hear Marie sing. The years went by. Harriet, to whom he had always sent what money he could muster, died, and left him free. He wedded Marie—and still Marie sang. When at length after* long yeabs, she also passed away, Berlioz was a man of sixty-one. In appearance he was now a sort of white-haired skeleton, although the tiger’s eyes were blazing still. Never was there a more striking instance of The fiery soul that, working out its way, , Fretted the pigmy body to decay. For the soul was fiery still—how fiery the last scone of all is now about to show.

1 Tlie Last Scene. Left 'lonely in the world, his thoughts went back to his first love, Estelle; indeed, through all the years i his inmost thoughts had never left ’ her. She was still alive, a widow, and a grandmother of sixty-seven', passing' a serene old age at Lyons. He resolved to seek her out. And so, upon this calm old lady in her soli, tude there bi'oke one day the apparition of a flame-eyed spectre.—tlie boy of fifty yearls before. She was changed, of eoui'se, as much as ne; but he only saw in her the young girl • dancing in her red shoes as he had seen her long ago. He was as much in love with her as ever. When he went away he wrote her letters of adoring passion. * She was obliged at last to (tell her Romeo that she was really past the age for Juliet, But no repulse could cool him. It happened . that he met at the same time, young Adelina Patti, when all (the world was at her feet. Berlioz seemed, to mesmerise her, as he had mesmerised so many women. But her beauty left him cold. “She is everything that,is adorable,’ ’he said, ‘but ishe is not Estelle.” When he dk u some five years later, the name of Estelle was the last that left his lips, The story is of intereist to the stu dent of The strange psychology of sex But if is no less of ! interest to the lever of romance. Where shall we find in hflstory or fiction, such a re°lZt JLT"!"* “ , ' d . or - of * heart , so lo bs Within its temple one abiding altar flame?—h Greenhough .Smith, in ‘John o' London’s Weekly.’ i-pnaon«