The Loves of Hector Berlioz, in His Life and in Les Troyens

IN A letter to his father written in 1830, Berlioz describes the suffering that overcame him when he was twelve: "I can recall those miserable days I spent gripped by emotion. When you were explaining Virgil's Aeneid to me. . . . I was seized by an affliction that drove me almost to despair. . . . Well that fantastic world has remained within me and has grown. . . . It has become a veritable sickness." ¹

Young Hector's empathy for the sufferings of Dido and Cassandra, culminating in his late-life masterpiece Les Troyens ,could hardly have been more acute or enduring—remarkably so in Cassandra's case, for Virgil devoted only five lines to her: "Cassandra, Priam's virgin daughter, dragged by her long hair out of Minerva's shrine, lifting her brilliant eyes in vain to heaven—her eyes alone, as her white hands were bound. Coroebus, infuriated, could not bear it, but plunged into the midst to find his death." ² The impact of Dido's share of the story on the youth was significantly greater; her suffering left Hector trembling and unable to speak. He was mesmerized by the bed the Carthaginian queen shared with Aeneas, the marital bed that she placed on the platform of her funeral pyre along with gifts and weapons of the "false-hearted" lover: "She pours forth on the bed—that bed with all its memories —the angry stream of her lifeblood." ³ But even before Dido and Cassandra inflamed Hector's imagination, another love awakened him to their suffering, a sublime and inextinguishable love, created not from history or literature but from real life: the eighteen (or nineteen)-year-old Estelle Dubeuf.

He first saw Estelle during a family vacation at his grandparents in the picturesque rural village of Meylan, at the foot of the Dauphiné mountains outside Grenoble. There above him, standing on a rock, was what appeared to be a goddess—tall, slim, with black hair and large eyes, wearing pink satin dancing slippers, something he had never seen before. The impressionable youngster was struck by a passion so acute and overpowering that his stella montis (star of the mountain) eventually became his muse, the central theme of his Memoirs , the inspiration for the love theme in his dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette and for the idée fixe in his Symphonie fantastique , and much more. The next time he saw Estelle, he recalls in his memoirs, his uncle Félix swept her away to the dance floor; the fact that his uncle had not been in Meylan that day had no bearing on the artist's internal reality, where Félix was cast as a rival in love. When Hector was fourteen, Estelle walked with him over the "sacred mountainside." It became her kingdom, and he invested every aspect of the landscape "with her numinous presence." ⁴

These figures awakened something that gave meaning to the pulsating sensations, the agonies and ecstasies of a pubescent boy whose physiological and psychological vibrations rose to the pitch of sickness. Puberty announces itself by way of hormonal changes and regressive longings that reawaken a boy's earliest love for the mother of infancy with a force that creates a permeability of the boundary between self and other, threatening psychic dissolution and becoming, particularly for the artistic child, the deepest source of inspiration and gratification.

One might ask why a Trojan princess who had been violently raped in front of her beloved and a Carthaginian queen whose lover abandoned her for a higher calling could have had such an impact on the young Berlioz; one might also wonder how Estelle on the mountain could become his lifelong muse and the consolation of his later years. Preceding them, and reflected in them, were his first loves, the main characters in his developmental drama: his father, Louis Berlioz (a practicing physician), and his mother, Josephine.

Every young...