Symphony of Seduction

by Christopher Lawrence

  It was the perfect setting in which to be smitten by the sight of a beautiful young woman standing on a rock during a mountainside ramble on a warm afternoon. There she was, admiring the view, a mythological figurehead with her black hair streaming in the light wind, the cliffs of Meylan behind her. She was eighteen.

  A boy fell in love for his first time – with an older woman. Of course, it was more than hopeless; it was the object of fun at a social dance gathering.

  ‘I couldn’t speak; it would have betrayed the immensity of my feelings to the room,’ Berlioz said. ‘Later, I thought I would write an opera for her and leave it on that rock for her to discover one morning. Crazy, of course, but you know, I still might do it someday. There isn’t a month that I don’t think of her. In her way, she is my most sacred memory. I’m told she married and enjoys a life without drama. It must be wonderful.’

  ‘I can assure you it is not, Monsieur Berlioz,’ said Amélie, cradling her tea with both hands, avoiding his eyes. ‘You make drama sound like something essential to life.’

  ‘Most drama in life is best avoided, madame. So much of it is unnecessary. I can think of only one exception in my own case. That’s why I call it the supreme drama of my life.’

  He took his story forward to 1827, when a troupe of actors from across the Channel gave a season of Shakespeare at the Odéon Theatre in Paris. All were English, save one player from Ireland, Harriet Smithson, who took on the leading roles in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. The young Berlioz attended the opening night, together with those who would become famous as the French ‘Romantics’, none of them able to understand a word of English, all of them thunderstruck by the experience.

  ‘It wasn’t just Harriet’s acting genius – yes, it was genius in the way she played Ophelia, tearing me apart with her voice and gestures – there was the revelation of Shakespeare as well,’ he said. ‘Harriet brought me to the light. I chose to love the messenger.’

  His subsequent behaviour became the talk of Paris: the abject letters to the actress who cautioned her circle to ‘beware the gentleman with the eyes that bode no good’, the letters to his friends, the sleepless nights on nocturnal walks ending in collapses in ditches or cafés like the Cardinal – the paroxysms of a young man taken to the edge of insanity by an obsession lasting days and nights for over two years. At the end of it all, he had a symphony, his ‘Episode in the Life of an Artist’ – the Fantastic Symphony.

  ‘How does someone who is close to madness create something so coherent?’ said Amélie, astonished.

  ‘Like all mad artists?’ he said with a grin. ‘That’s the legend, isn’t it – the crazed genius in the garret? Passion is not as debilitating as you think, Amélie. I transferred my state of mind and all my malignant impulses to paper, leaving my mind clear. The young artist at the centre of its story does all the things I could never have done, even at my nadir; it starts with a failed suicide and goes downhill from there. I even wrote a description of what the music is about. Harriet is there all the way through, a recurring melody, a fixed idea – all the way to the witches’ dance at the end.’

  ‘I’m sure she was delighted about that,’ said Amélie, grinning in turn.

  ‘She didn’t know – we’d never met, and I moved on for a while to someone else,’ said Berlioz. His vagueness was intentional. ‘It’s liberating, becoming a voyeur of one’s own life. For me, to be creative is to be at a remove from the enslavement of feeling. I told Wagner I could only draw the moon by seeing its reflection at the bottom of a well.’

  Amélie looked puzzled. ‘That sounds cold, Monsieur Berlioz. I remember the man I first saw in a cemetery a few weeks ago. He was not without feeling.’

  He felt for the presence of his handkerchief.

  ‘Now, in my dotage, I do not create. All that space in my life where music used to be! Once again, it is filled with too many feelings, but they are only old ones, bringing all of my past back with them. I suppose this is the nostalgia of the elderly,’ he said, more to himself than to her.

  ‘Perhaps it is time you created some new ones,’ she said.

  ‘When I am here with you, such a thing seems possible,’ he said.

  She blushed, and moved back to Berlioz’s story. ‘What happened to Miss Smithson?’

  ‘Oh, it ended badly. She became Madame Berlioz.’

  ‘What?’ said Amélie, incredulous.

  Berlioz traced the trajectory of a love first incarnated in music as it spiralled down once life stepped in. Harriet finally heard the Fantastic Symphony two years after it was written; its public status as a love letter made a formal meeting unavoidable. She capitulated, they exchanged expressions of love in fractured versions of each other’s language, married against the opposition of his parents, had a son and struggled with finances as his career went up and hers went down, taking her looks and self-esteem with it. She hit the bottle, and the drinking stoked the fire of suspicion; midnight demands that he swear to his fidelity, he protesting his innocence.

  And through all that decade of the 1830s, some of his greatest music: an opera about Benvenuto Cellini, a massive Requiem with its Day of Judgement, and three more symphonies, including one where Harriet’s light shone one last glorious time – Romeo and Juliet, with a love scene in the garden of the Capulets that he always thought to be the most beautiful music he ever wrote.

  ‘Looking back, it was my farewell to Harriet, my tribute to the dawn of that love,’ he said sadly. ‘Music can give an idea of love. It doesn’t seem to work the other way around.’

  He stopped at that point. Was it propriety or cowardice that made him unwilling to describe an ending that lacked any of the poetry of a beginning? Having a mistress was not uncommon in Paris, but abandoning one’s wife for one was a vulgar turn of events for someone of Berlioz’s supposed refinement of character. It didn’t feel very romantic in real life when he eloped with a singer whose dubious vocal talents were easily eclipsed by those she showed in bed, and it didn’t feel very poetic when Marie turned up on Harriet’s doorstep one day to announce herself as the ‘preferred’ Madame Berlioz. It wasn’t beautiful to observe Harriet’s descent through alcoholism and strokes to her death in 1854. None of this sounded like the stuff of a romantic symphony.

  The only way to atone for more than a decade of moral dishonour was to make his mistress a ‘respectable’ woman. Sure, it was not love any more – it never really had been, he had to admit – but at least the ménage promised him some stability for the rest of his life; and besides, his Spanish mother-in-law was totally devoted to him.

  But just as love had shown no longevity, neither had pragmatism.

  ‘That is why we met where we did, madame,’ Berlioz said. ‘My wife died earlier this year. A heart attack; she was not yet fifty.’

  Amélie was dumbstruck. ‘You say you did not love her as you did Harriet, and yet you can weep by her grave?’

  ‘Amélie, think back to our very first conversation, when I mentioned the lessons of experience and talked about my song cycle Summer Nights.’

  ‘The ghost of the lover?’

  ‘That’s right. The cycle ends with a song called “The Unknown Island”. A young girl asks a boatman to take her to the shore where love lasts forever. He replies casually that nobody knows where that is, ma chère. How about we try for someplace else? I place a little minor cadence at that point to give it a mock-serious tone, like a half-hearted eulogy at a funeral. Twenty years later, I weep in a cemetery because time proved that boatman right.’

  There was an awkward silence. Amélie reached for his hand to anticipate the tears that might follow. That was the excuse she gave herself, anyway.

  ‘That’s not necessarily the right deduction, monsieur,’ she said. ‘Perhaps he was always sailing in the wrong direction. It happens, you know. We all live in hope for some better navigation. Haven’t you wondered why I happened to be in Montmartre Cemetery at the same time as you that day?’

  His face relaxed
as his eyes widened in amazement at his own lack of curiosity.

  ‘It has never occurred to me, madame. A pleasant walk to pass the time? You said your husband is always away.’

  ‘Indeed he is, Monsieur Berlioz. He died last year. I too was visiting a grave.’

  Now it was Berlioz’s turn to open his mouth in disbelief. ‘I saw your ring, but you were not wearing black.’

  ‘One only mourns the passing of those whom one has loved,’ she said.

  Things changed rapidly between Berlioz and his café confidante after that.

  Amélie had become a student of his life. He felt she had already intuited as many things about living as he had actually lived. With such an even level of exchange their bond deepened: soon he was ‘Hector’, and very soon after that, ‘dear Hector’. They both pretended these were merely expressions of complicity.

  They took walks together, he leaning against her for support and a little warmth, she snuggling her left hand into the wide sleeve of his coat. Her body felt thin as it pressed against his. They were both glad that winter’s cold gave them an excuse for closeness.

  One morning they returned arm in arm to the cemetery where it all began. Amélie took Hector to her husband’s grave, the headstone still new and gleaming white. She spoke little about him, except to remark that she had been very young, and he a much older man.

  Berlioz looked at her, an eyebrow raised.

  She actually laughed – her husband lying just there – and said, ‘No, my dear Hector, even then it was never love’s dream! I have been ill for much of my life and he promised my parents to look after me no matter what might come. It was accepted on all sides as an arrangement.’

  Then they moved on like a pair of official greeters to search out the other new arrivals, the flowers still fresh on the cold stone.

  When Amélie stopped unexpectedly one morning in that place of death, held his face, kissed him, and drew away while whispering ‘my dear Hector’, he looked around for witnesses. The winter was not the culprit this time.

  ‘Sweet Amélie …’ he began, pausing to be interrupted because he did not know what else to say.

  ‘Hector, I want your boatman to be wrong,’ she said.

  That evening she came to his apartment. His mother-in-law had stayed on after her daughter’s death to look after the widowed composer, but she was away.

  Amélie asked to stay, and they lay down together fully dressed on his bed for the entire night, he wanting only to hold her to him as she slept. When he woke the next morning she had left. Her short letter was on a side table, written in a firm hand.

  My dearest friend

  I see land ahead. Come ashore with me.

  Then I might hear your music.

  Who can say how much time we have?

  You are loved.

  Your Amélie

  The love scene of his Romeo and Juliet symphony came to his mind, with the cellos in the orchestra capturing all the ardour of the young Montague with the first appearance of their soaring theme, and in comparing it with this, the first simple declaration of love he had ever received in his life, Berlioz realised that once again his music had anticipated the reality.

  By the time he showed the letter to his friend Legouvé, he had already decided how this should play out, even though he loved her in return. As much as she insisted that the difference in their ages had no bearing on her feelings, a voice of pessimism or pragmatism from the depths of his heart kept on reminding him that this love was impossible.

  ‘I’m sixty, Ernest,’ he said. ‘Look at these wrinkles.’

  ‘What does that matter if she sees you as thirty?’ said Legouvé. ‘Wrinkles don’t matter in someone like you. She is a superior woman, full of warmth and tenderness. You don’t think she can assess the risk?’

  ‘She cannot love me. My friend, this is a heaven I must not enter – for her sake.’

  And then he sobbed inconsolably. So did Amélie when Berlioz told her.

  They saw each other once more, at a performance of his opera The Trojans, picked up by the impresario Carvalho and staged at the Théâtre-Lyrique in November the following year in a stunted version.

  Amélie was standing with an older woman across the crowded lobby during an interval, her eyes boring into him through a wall of Second Empire finery. She looked tired, thinner than when he explained to her on a shiny spring afternoon why they should not meet again. When she stepped away from her escort, making a space that he was being invited to fill, he resisted the impulse and instead nodded his greeting. Her face sagged and she nodded back, before their sightlines were obscured by the crush of patrons returning to their seats to watch Aeneas rush off to Rome, leaving Dido behind to kill herself.

  PARIS, 1864

  Hector Berlioz paid his respects to his two wives, noticing that Harriet’s grave was less well-tended than Marie’s; his mother-in-law was dedicated to the neat preservation of her daughter’s memory. He would bring his first wife some more fresh flowers next time.

  Remembering the walks he used to take around the cemetery in company during those magical winter days, he thought he would look for the new headstones and their unfortunate subjects. He felt complicity with them now. They were just a little way up the queue from him, if his worsening gut was any indication.

  The terrain was so familiar, its alternation of black and white marble, gilt lettering and simple carving, the florid and the austere, all burned into his memory. One headstone over to his left had something about it he remembered less well … of course, it was that of Amélie’s husband; her unloved protector, the person described by his widow in a café as being ‘away all the time’.

  Berlioz stepped over to inspect the grave for only the second time, curious to see how the passage of time had worked its way into the stone. Its pristine whiteness had faded, the formerly clean edges of the carving already showing the first signs of their inevitable obliteration. The stone alongside was newer still, ready to endure the onslaught of a harsh Parisian winter. He leaned closer to check the dates.

  Then he stopped, and the pain in his stomach gave way to the rapid beating of his heart. The summer air turned icy cold.

  It was she.

  It was Amélie’s grave.

  She had been dead for the past six months.

  He now remembered her reference to an undisclosed illness; how thin she looked when he saw her for the final time.

  Then that question in her letter: Who can say how much time we have?

  He had thought she was referring to him, sounding a note of caution about his age.

  In fact, she had been talking about herself.

  Berlioz stayed indoors for a week, thinking about the episodes of love in his life.

  Each had been remarked upon in his work – excepting this one. There would be no memorial in music to Amélie. He had put down his pen for good. This time he would treat a tragic death as a call to action, instead of reflection.

  Most of the great loves in his life had been snatched away. Only one remained that was in need of resolution – perhaps a happy one after all this time – and she was still alive. This time he would try to fulfil the promise of a final glorious relationship that he had failed in doing with Amélie.

  It would end as it had begun. He decided to pick up the thread of nearly fifty years ago and seek out his star – his Stella.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Berlioz tracked down the now 67-year-old Estelle Fournier and visited her in Lyon to resume their friendship. Gently rebuffing his declaration of love, she was nonetheless happy to receive him as a guest over several ensuing summers. The episode is described in the closing pages of his Mémoires.

  Hector wrote to her almost every month up to his death in March 1869.

  Estelle died in 1876.

 

 

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