She’s just not that into you—a love story in five movements

Happy Sunday Reader!
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One of my most cherished memories as a teenager was a visit to London’s Royal Albert Hall for a night at the Proms, one of a marathon of classical concerts that runs every summer for eight weeks.

The Henry Wood Promenade Concerts have been running since 1895, notable for their broad repertoire and relaxed atmosphere. The concerts also attract a fresh intake of enthusiasts.

Students and first-timers mix with the hardcore in the Arena—the standing area in front of the orchestra. Bodies pack in tight, swaying harmoniously—bound by a shared passion for classical music and cheap tickets. These are the 'Promenaders'.

Less classical concert—more Glastonbury with violins.

The Last Night of the Proms in particular is recognisable for a very British outpouring of patriotism. Concert-goers who’ve spent a lifetime in evening dress appear as tubas, Union Jacks, inflatable trumpets and the occasional vegetable.

My visit wasn’t the Last Night of the Proms, but the evening promised its own brand of lunacy: Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.

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Louis-Hector Berlioz was born in December 1803 in the small town of La Côte-Saint-André, about 35 miles northwest of Grenoble. France was still recovering from a Revolution, and Napoleon was a year away from crowning himself Emperor.

Having spent most of his youth in La Côte-Saint-André, Berlioz dutifully arrived in Paris in 1821 to study medicine, as his father wished. Less dutifully, he abandoned his studies almost immediately after discovering the Paris Opera—at which point dissecting cadavers lost its appeal.

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Out of curiosity

Paris in the 1820s was regaining its swagger. The Bourbon monarchy had been reinstalled, albeit tentatively, while Napoleon was seeing out his days marooned on the remote island of St. Helena somewhere in the South Atlantic.

A new generation of writers, painters and musicians was emerging with new ideas about self-expression: emotional, passionate, unashamedly dramatic. They were the Romantics.

Composers were abandoning the formal structures of Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn in favour of greater intensity, colour and drama.

Few managed it better than Berlioz.

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Louis-Hector attended the Paris Conservatoire to study composition and quickly determined, with characteristic modesty, that he was—in all probability—a musical genius. As it turned out, he had a point.

Unfortunately, his romantic judgement was less reliable. In September 1827, he attended a performance of Hamlet at the Odeon Theatre in Paris. He instantly fell in love with Ophelia—or rather, an Irish actress called Harriet Smithson.

Berlioz became obsessed with Harriet, unperturbed that she didn’t know he existed. He wrote endless letters, attended her every performance and behaved in the audience with the subtlety of a man who'd just caught fire. In England, we would call this stalking. The French called it love.

Over time, Miss Smithson became aware that she had acquired a wild-eyed admirer and took steps to avoid him.

In desperation, Berlioz did what he did best. He wrote music.

Hector would create a five-movement symphony inspired by Harriet, chronicling his obsessive and increasingly unhinged passion for her. A psychedelic autobiography set to music.

The hero (Berlioz himself, of course) becomes obsessed with an unattainable woman. In despair, he swallows opium and tumbles into a narcotic nightmare: a trip through a swirling ballroom and tranquil countryside before murdering his beloved and being marched to the scaffold.

For the finale, his muse reappears at a witches’ sabbath, transformed into a cackling hag and dancing gleefully on his corpse. Not exactly The Sound of Music, I admit.

Berlioz would call it ’Symphonie fantastique’.

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One hundred and ninety-five years ago this Friday, 5 December 1830, the Symphonie fantastique received its world première at the Paris Conservatoire.

Hector Berlioz took centre-stage, standing tall with baton in hand, ready to conduct his orchestral obsession in front of the world.

Then, for forty-five pulsating minutes, the audience sat stunned as the young conductor careened through his romantic nightmare.

It was an instant hit. Some of the old guard muttered something about violated classical forms. The younger generation didn’t care. This was new, shocking, beautiful.

When Harriet returned to Paris in 1832, she attended a performance of the Symphonie fantastique. Her symphony. As a result, she finally agreed to meet Berlioz. Evidently, the bit about being murdered by her admirer to then reappear as a shrieking hag cackling over his corpse didn’t raise any red flags.

In one of history’s more unlikely romances, Hector and Harriet fell in love and married the following year.

Don’t you love a happy ending? Well, not this time. The marriage was a disaster. Within a few short years, the couple were living apart, though they never divorced.

Hector Berlioz would become one of the great composers of the Romantic era. He died in 1869, aged 65. Harriet had died four years earlier, having suffered from poor health for most of the rest of her life.

Before Berlioz died, he left instructions that Harriet’s body was to be exhumed and buried next to his. They lie together in Montmartre Cemetery—united in death in a way they never quite managed in life.

Perhaps that counts as a happy ending.

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Having read about Hector Berlioz and his obsession with Harriet Smithson, my visit to the Royal Albert Hall all those years ago now makes perfect sense. I realise that the Symphonie fantastique is five movements of glorious, unhinged madness. It isn’t just music—it is a psychotic episode set to orchestra.

High up in the gallery, I looked down on a stage crammed with musicians, perhaps a hundred in all. This was a big orchestra for a big orchestral work.

There were four harps, four timpani, three trombones, an army of strings and enough woodwinds to stock a small forest. There were musicians everywhere.

And then the Symphonie fantastique began.

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The music lurched between extremes—soaring one moment, plunging into despair the next. By the time the opium took hold, the hero had been dragged to the guillotine, the mob screaming for blood. His head fell with a single orchestral stroke.

By the final movement, I was exhausted. Berlioz descended into hell and tried to take me with him. Church bells tolled. Tubas, bassoons and trombones belted out the Dies Irae. Witches shrieked and danced. Death chants and the mangled love theme collided in glorious, unholy chaos.

The orchestra raced to its conclusion. Cymbals crashed, timpani rumbled and roared. The string section pumped their bows frantically, heads thrashing like the front row at a Metallica concert.

Faster now. Louder. All hundred musicians blasted, slashed and crashed for their lives. And through the bedlam, Berlioz’s cackling hag danced with demons. The witches had won, he was dead and hell was celebrating.

The whole experience was brutal, uncompromising…. and magnificent.

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Dates with History

Today…

Samuel Langhorne Clemens—better known as the author Mark Twain—was born in Florida, Missouri 190 years ago today, 30 November 1835.

Samuel was born while the 1835 Halley’s Comet was still blazing across the night sky.

Mark Twain is best remembered—certainly in England, among those of us who grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s—for his wonderful children’s stories, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Prince and the Pauper.

Twain was fascinated by the cosmic symmetry of Halley’s Comet reappearing more or less in line with a human lifespan. He referred to himself and Halley as ’two unaccountable freaks’ on the grounds of his birth being in line with the 1835 comet. ​ So it was not surprising that, in 1909, Twain said to his biographer…

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Halley’s Comet reached its perihelion on 20 April 1910. It was particularly memorable for two reasons: firstly, it passed close to Earth, within 13.9 million miles—about 15% of the distance from Earth to the Sun.

Secondly, the Earth passed through the comet’s tail. Spectroscopy had revealed that the tail contained toxic gas, which encouraged French astronomer Camille Flammarion to predict that life on Earth might end. Worldwide panic followed.

Mark Twain died hours after Halley’s comet’s perihelion, 21 April 1910.

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Out of curiosity

The perihelion of a comet is the point at which it passes closest to the sun. In other words, it is the point when it appears brightest from Earth, making it the best time to observe. ​

The Sun’s heat melts the comet’s ice, releasing gas and dust particles. The gases appear to glow and the sunlight reflects off the dust particles, creating that distinctive tail.

Halley’s Comet reappears every 74-79 years.

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Tuesday…

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was born in Kenya in 1903 to British missionary parents. By 1929, he had completed a PhD on the Stone Age cultures of Kenya—not for the faint-hearted.

A year later he first visited the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, a 30-mile-long crack in the earth’s surface that reveals two million years of evolutionary history in its layered walls.

From the mid-30s onward, Leakey and his wife, Mary, revisited the gorge over several decades. In 1959, his wife Mary discovered the skull of an ancient human relative, later identified as a vegetarian cousin of our human ancestors.

The following year, 65 years ago this Tuesday, 2 December 1960, Louis discovered the fossil known as Olduvai Hominid 9 (OH 9) which he dubbed ‘Chellean Man’, subsequently identified as a 1.4 million year old ‘Homo erectus’, the first truly human-like species.

Chellean Man helped confirm that Homo erectus was a large-brained early human and that human evolution originated in Africa, not Asia.

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Talk to me...

I receive some wonderful feedback from readers who add colour to the historical snippets that I publish. If you have any thoughts to add to some of today’s topics, or from previous weeks, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an email at steve@battingthebreeze.com.

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Question of the Week

He was born at Berkeley Plantation, Virginia in 1773—a British subject.

His father Benjamin was a signatory to the US Declaration of Independence.

He eloped with Anna Tuthill Symmes in 1795. Together they had 10 children.

He aborted medical school in 1793 to join the United States Army.

He became President of the United States of America, giving the longest inaugural speech in American history; 31 times longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863.

Who was he?

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And Finally

About four weeks ago, I was introduced to a building I’d never seen or heard of. My son came back from Barcelona and shared some photos of an architectural wonder—one that quite literally took his breath away.

It had the look of an enormous cathedral-like candle that someone had left burning far too long. The Gothic spires and edges had begun their slow collapse, wax pooling and drooping in the Barcelona heat, but then everything stopped mid-melt and fixed itself in time.

Each of its towers (eighteen in all I think) looked as if they’d been assembled by an oversized sand artist in an altered state of consciousness, unable to stop finessing their extraordinary creation. Yet somehow the towers might have also grown organically from the earth, outrageously dense in detail, poised to bloom at any moment.

This was Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família.

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Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was born in 1852 in Reus, Catalonia. His father, Francesc, was a coppersmith. Antoni spent much of his childhood watching Francesc transform flat sheets of copper into curved vessels using nothing more than heat and a hammer.

These vessels would become the cauldrons used by local distilleries. Gaudí was mesmerised by his father’s ability to convert flat metal into objects that expressed flow and movement—that possessed an almost living quality.

As a sickly child, Antoni spent much of his time away from school. He used those hours to immerse himself in nature—observing the geometric spirals of snail shells, the chaotic branching of trees and the way light forced itself through the gaps in the leaves.

He spent the next ten years studying architecture at Barcelona’s Provincial School of Architecture (now part of Barcelona University). Antoni graduated with the underwhelming endorsement of the school’s director, who observed…

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Gaudí’s early commissions largely followed convention, but they revealed hints of the natural forms he’d studied as a child—the curves, the spirals, the organic growth.

His breakthrough came while building Casa Vicens, a richly decorated home for the stockbroker Manuel Vicens. The construction raised some eyebrows.

In 1883, at the age of 31, he was appointed architect for the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family, better known as the Sagrada Família.

The project to build a Roman Catholic basilica would consume Antoni for the rest of his life.

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Construction of the Sagrada Família had been underway for a year when he took control. With little more than a neo-Gothic crypt in place, Gaudí was gifted a near-blank canvas. For the next 43 years, he transformed a conventional Gothic church into something unprecedented.

Year by year, the basilica grew from the earth as if seeds had been scattered across the site and something utterly magical was blooming.

Gaudí found time to complete other works, the most notable of which was Park Güell in 1914, a complex of parks, gardens and buildings. Moorish architecture meets the gingerbread man.

As Gaudí grew older, he moved onto the site. He wore the same threadbare clothes, lived on bread and milk, grew increasingly dishevelled—and didn’t care. He lived only for the Sagrada Família.

Every square inch of the structure drew breath from passers by. But one element in particular stopped them in their tracks—The Nativity façade.

The façade is divided into three porticos representing Hope, Faith and Charity. Every square inch is consumed by exploding life: exotic plants, fruit, ducks, geese, pheasants, turkeys, sparrows, nightingales, turtles and tortoises. In the centre of the façade are the baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph flanked by a bull and a mule.

The finish suggests something wild and overgrown rather than meticulously carved. It is extraordinary, and it sits high on my list of places to visit.

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Out of the Nativity façade rises the Tower of Saint Barnabas, capped with a ceramic-covered spire that watches over Barcelona like a lighthouse guarding the coast.

The tower was completed 100 years ago today, 30 November 1925. Poignantly, it would be the first and last bell tower of the Nativity façade that Gaudí would see finished in his lifetime.

Six months later, lost in thought, he was out walking and stepped into the path of an oncoming tram. Mistaken for an anonymous beggar in his shabby clothes, he was rushed to a pauper’s hospital in the city.

By the time he was recognised as Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, he was dead. It was three days before his 74th birthday.

One hundred years later, the basilica is still unfinished. Some suggest it could be finished in 2026, others believe it should remain unfinished as a gesture to Gaudí.

Either way, it remains an architectural marvel.

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Out of Curiosity

The writer George Orwell—who fought in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37—once described the Sagrada Família in his book, ‘Homage to Catalonia’, as…

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He went on to suggest that the Anarchists in the Civil War…

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Vincent Van Gogh sold less than ten of his 860 oil paintings in his lifetime. His pioneering post-impressionism, wild colours and thick bold brush strokes, was ahead of its time. Today, his works have reached $117 million at auction.

Some things take a little time to appreciate.

Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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Question of the week… answer

William Henry Harrison.

William Henry Harrison was the last President of the United States to be born a British subject.

He was the ninth and shortest-serving US president, elected 185 years ago this Tuesday, 2 December 1840. He managed 32 days in power before unexpectedly passing away.

Harrison contrasted his short stay in office by delivering the longest inaugural address in US history—one hour and 45 minutes. Mercifully, his friend Daniel Webster had shortened the first draft.

Harrison may have died from a bout of pneumonia (some suggest his extended inaugural address in the cold and wet without a coat may well have brought it on—you reap what you sow, I guess).

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A more contemporary theory suggests Harrison’s death was caused by typhoid fever, contracted from contaminated drinking water. It turns out sewage was regularly dumped a few blocks upstream from the White House.

Washington’s sanitation was so appalling at the time that sewage may have also claimed the life of President Zachary Taylor.

When Harrison married Anna, his father-in-law, Judge Symmes, was less than thrilled by his entry into the family. Symmes wrote to a friend….

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William Henry Harrison was the grandfather of Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President of the United States between 1889 and 1893.

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