To the concert-goer the name Hector Berlioz calls up a series of vast and magnificent whirlwinds of vocal and orchestral sonority, the thoughts of scores that sound and look imposingly complex to the eyes and ears of both the educated and uneducated in the composer’s art.  We have a vision of close pages embodying the most unequivocal and drastic of musical “realism.”  The full audacity and mastery of a certain sort of genius are represented in his vast works.  They bespeak, too, the combative musician and reformer.  Berlioz took the kingdom of music by violence.

[Illustration:  Hector Berlioz]

His chef d’oeuvres do not all say to us as much as he meant them to say, not as much as they all uttered twenty years ago.  There is much clay as well as gold in them.  But such tremendous products of his energy and intellect as the ‘Requiem,’ the ‘Te Deum,’ ‘The Damnation of Faust,’ his best descriptive symphonies such as the ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ are yet eloquent to the public and to the critical-minded.  His best was so very good that his worst—­weighed as a matter of principle or execution, regarded as music or “programme music”—­can be excused.

Berlioz’s actual biography is a long tale of storm and stress.  Not only was he slow in gaining appreciation while he lived; full comprehension of his power was not granted him till after his energetic life was over.  Recognition in his own country is incomplete to day.  He was born in 1803, near picturesque Grenoble, in the little town of Cote St. Andre, the son of an excellent country doctor.  Sent to Paris to study medicine, he became a musician against his father’s wish, and in lieu of the allowance that his father promptly withdrew, the young man lived by engaging in the chorus of the Gymnase, and by catching at every straw for subsistence.  He became a regular music-student of the Conservatory, under the admirable Lesueur and Reicha; quitted the Conservatory in disgust at its pedantry, in 1825; and lived and advanced in musical study as best he could for a considerable time.  His convictions in art were founded largely on the rock of Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber; and however modern, and however widely his work departs from such academic models, Berlioz never forswore a certain allegiance to these great and serene masters.  He returned to the Conservatory, studied hard, gained the Prix de Rome, gradually took a prominent place among Parisian composers, and was as enthusiastically the subject of a cult as was Wagner.  His concerts and the production of his operas encountered shameful cabals.  His strongest works were neglected or ill-served.  To their honor, German musicians understood him, Schumann and Liszt in especial.  Only in Germany to-day are his colossal operas heard.  The Italian Paganini showed a generous interest in his struggles.  Russia and Austria too admired him, while his compatriots hissed.  His career was one of endless work, disappointments, brief successes, battles, hopes, and despairs.  Personally, too, it was full of the happiness and unhappiness of the artistic temperament.