The life of Hector Berlioz as written by himself in his letters and memoirs

I had married again--_it was my duty_, and after eight years my wife died suddenly of heart disease. Some time after her burial in the great cemetery at Montmartre, my dear frie...

I read and re-read, I copied, I learnt Gluck’s scores by heart, I forgot to eat, drink, or sleep, and when at last I managed to hear _Iphigenia in Tauris_, I swore that, despite...

The Blessing of the Daggers from the _Huguenots_ was given with an imposing effect that surpassed my expectations. I wished Meyerbeer could have heard it. It worked upon me so t...

Indulgent as my father was over my work, yet, for a long while, he was unable to make me love the classics. It seemed impossible to me to concentrate my thoughts long enough to...

But the antipathy of the two latter to Gluck and Weber I believe to be due to quite another reason--a natural inability in these two comfortable portly gentlemen to understand t...

“I am shut up in the Institute _for the last time_, for the prize _shall_ be mine this year, our happiness hangs on it. Every other day Madame Moke sends her maid with messages....

General Bernard, a thoroughly honourable man, had promised me ten thousand francs for the performance as soon as I brought from the Minister of the Interior a promise to pay the...

Nothing but a regular _coup d’état_ at home made the execution of this plan possible. On one pretext or another, my wife had always set her face against my leaving Paris, her re...

He sent de Pons his six hundred francs, and told me that, if I refused to give up my musical wild-goose chase, I must depend on myself alone, for he would help me no more.

“Have I told you of my parting with Henriette--of our scenes, despair, reproaches, which ended in my taking poison? Her protestations of love and sorrow brought back my desire t...

I had first felt it at La Côte Saint-André, when I was sixteen. One lovely May morning I was sitting in a meadow, under the shade of a spreading oak, reading Montjoie’s _Manuscr...

“You are right to avoid all that might disturb your calm; but be assured that I should never have done so, and that this friendship, for which I so humbly begged, should never h...

All went splendidly at rehearsal; Fétis did his best for me, and everything seemed to smile, when, with my usual luck, an hour before the concert there broke over Paris the wors...

I found one. We stopped to change horses at a little Sardinian village--Ventimiglia, I believe[11]--and, begging five minutes from the guard, I hurried into a café, seized a scr...

The first night it was received with hisses and laughter, the next the audience began to see something in the Huntsmen’s Chorus, and they let the rest pass. Then they rather fan...

“I stay there sometimes four hours at a time. We go long walks beside the lake. Yesterday we took a drive, but I am never alone with her, so can speak only of outward things, an...

“_23rd March._--Your letter is an unexpected pleasure, dear boy. With seventy francs a month you can easily save, if you give up your habit of squandering money. Tell me whether...

“How can I teach you patience? Your mania for marriage would make me laugh were I not saddened by seeing you striving after the heaviest of all fetters and after the sordid vexa...

“I took my revenge a few days after by putting on Montfort’s piano a manuscript copy of an air from _Telemaco_ without the author’s name to it. Mendelssohn came, picked it up th...

On returning to France I took my boy to see his relations at La Côte Saint-André. Poor Louis! how happy he was; petted by relations and old servants and wandering about the fiel...

Autobiography is open to the charge of egoism; somewhat unjustly since, in writing of oneself, the personal note must predominate and, in the case of a genius--sure of his goal...

“I hear that the sculptor is having three copies of my New York bust cast; was it you who suggested getting one for the St Petersburg Conservatoire? More can easily be made.