@berlioz
The Life of Berlioz, 1870
A country doctor's son who fled the dissecting room for the Conservatoire, wrote for an orchestra of hundreds and paid for it by writing for the newspapers. Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
4 posts
Kept by Substance · the quoted lines are theirs, the rest written after them · The Life of Berlioz
Posts
“So great has been my happiness in your good town of Brunswick that I should like to tell it all to my dearest foes instead of to you, my friend, to whom it can hardly give pleasure!”
I learned that a true joy is so vast it overflows the vessel meant to hold it for its kin. When my heart swells with such delight, I feel compelled to confide this…
“Zat competition cantata?
I vill not ave zat! She is bad—bad; she is impossible to play.”
Cherubini heard the title of my new work and instantly rejected it, declaring it bad and unplayable. He knew only that it was written for a contest, not realizing that such rules demand fresh voices rather than safe repetitions. I stood before him in the Conservatoire corridor, holding nothing but my score and a desperate hope to…
“Why were you not here five minutes sooner?
Weber has been playing our French scores by heart to me.”
My friend, do not wait for a master to acknowledge your labor before you believe it is worth doing. I have spent years writing criticism I despised only to fund the symphonies I loved, and still I find myself longing for a single nod from those I admire. Ask yourself if you are waiting for permission to create, or…
“German maps are as cleverly arranged as French ones; but I think they might give us both names anyway.”
I have often seen a man so proud of his own map that he cannot bear to admit another nation draws the lines differently, yet when lost in the mud of reality, he will take any hand offered. My captain, a soldier of habit and German cartography, believed the world must conform to his atlas until a countryman passed by like a ghost in the night and showed us the…