Hector Berlioz. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Rome, April 1831. Hector Berlioz, twenty-seven, is at the Villa Medici as winner of the Prix de Rome, and receives from Paris the letter he has dreaded for weeks: his fiancée, the pianist Camille Moke, is marrying someone else. And not just anyone: Camille Pleyel, heir to the most famous piano factory in France. The letter, with an extra twist of malice, comes from her mother.
What follows is not a malicious reconstruction by biographers: Berlioz tells it himself, in minute detail, in his Memoirs, one of the most shameless books a musician has ever written. The plan, conceived in an afternoon: return to Paris, present himself at the Moke house disguised as a maid, complete with dress, bonnet and veil bought for the purpose; once shown into the drawing room, draw the two double-barrelled pistols and kill the mother, the daughter and the groom; then kill himself. And since pistols can jam, in his pocket the little bottles of laudanum and strychnine too. He bought everything, climbed into the stagecoach and set off north.
The tragedy slid into farce at the first stop: in Genoa, in the bustle of changing carriages, the luggage with the disguise was lost. Berlioz, who always believed in his own theatrics, but with the half-life of a summer storm, had another one ordered, then reached Nice, saw the sea, and the plan evaporated. He stayed in Nice twenty days, which he called the happiest of his life: he slept, swam, and wrote the overture to King Lear. He even apologised by letter to the director of the Villa Medici, who took him back pretending to believe the story of a pleasure trip.
The episode is irresistible, but it should be read for what it is: Romanticism in its pure state, where the border between life and melodrama is not thin, it is abolished. Berlioz is the same man who two years earlier had turned an unrequited amorous obsession into the Symphonie fantastique, complete with a march to the scaffold and a final witches’ sabbath: murder in a maid’s dress is the rough draft of a work that, fortunately, he chose to write in notes and not in the crime pages. And the Memoirs, which sit in the Melos library and read like a novel, are the document of an age in which an artist told his own worst with pride, certain that posterity would understand. He was right: we understand, we laugh, and immediately afterwards we put on the Fantastique.