Speaking of corrupted endeavour, I was recently struck by the grubby tale of poor Harriet Smithson, the Irish Actress who married the French composer Hector Berlioz and inspired his "Symphonie Fantastique". My source for the following information is not a venerable tome. It is not even the Encyclopedia Britannica. Rather, it is a two-bit Australian Magazine called 'Parade' from October 1976. The author of the article is uncredited. 'Parade' was a rather odd magazine, seemingly designed for the type of character who likes to know a little bit about a lot of things. (In other words, a stupefying bore like myself). In the same edition of 'Parade' were articles about Mao Tse-tung, scandalous dukes, charming snakes, courageous opera singers and Oscar Wilde's 'ugly' lecherous father. Needless to say, I found it unputdownable. I have chosen it as my source of information about Harriet Smithson for its focus on the tawdry and sensational at the expense of the worthy. And in the hope that it will be utterly, utterly unreliable. I always believe in choosing the past that suits one best..
The article begins with a very dramatic tableaux: Parisian audiences "frozen into silence broken only by sighs and sobbing" in the presence of Harriet playing the loopy Ophelia scene from 'Hamlet'. It continues:"There was one young man in the audience whose emotional reaction to the intense acting went even deeper. Springing to his feet, a great cry of agony flooded from his throat and with tears coursing down his cheeks he fled. And so began the tragic love affair of the beautiful Harriet Smithson and the man who could not bear the realism of her superb acting, the composer Hector Berlioz." This rather high-spirited behavior on Hector's part may be partly explained by the fact that, at the time, he was "living in squalid circumstances in the Latin Quarter on a diet of dates and milk."
Hector then embarked on a campaign of stalking Harriet into marrying him, described by 'Parade' as "what seemed a forlorn campaign to win her." Harriet was, after all, a "slender, blue-eyed colleen with the thrilling passion in her voice..". To the French, she was 'La Belle Smidson'. She had many admirers including the 'fat, gouty King Charles X.'
Hector's campaign got off to a faltering start. He staged a magnificent concert of his own compositions and was widely feted. But Harriet "was scarcely aware it had even been held". She ordered her maid to return his countless letters unopened. Eventually, however, as Hector's star began to rise, Harriet's began to wane. She tried and failed to establish a permanent English theatre in Paris with herself as star. She toured in expensive flops and spent too much money. "By 1832 her company, tired of being unpaid, returned to England leaving Harriet in a Paris that had lost interest in her."
It was then that she met the now-succesful Hector who still held one big candle for her. He "swallowed laudanum and took a life-saving draft only when she begged him not to die."
And then she married the kook.
Harriet then commenced what could be only be described as her downward spiral. Hector didn't really help matters much by staging a huge concert for her benefit, but managing to have his heavyweight pals (a bunch of nobodies by the name of Chopin, Liszt and Alexandre Dumas) totally upstage poor Harriet: "Harriet's Ophelia roused only a few polite handclaps, and in a fury, she stormed out of the hall swearing never to appear on the stage."
Harriet then became insanely jealous of her husband (he apparently had to leave for tours in the middle of the night to escape her outbursts) and lived a hand to mouth existence in Montmarte. She accused him of schtupping every woman he came across. She may have some grounds for this because: "Finally in 1842 he set out for a concert tour of Belgium taking with him as mistress Marie Recio, a singer of limited attainments."
Hector then all but abandoned Harriet and their kid. She, in turn, "had taken to drink, became disgustingly obese and developed an ugly skin disease." Harriet died, Hector re-married and then his second wife also pre-deceased him. Hector then had the brilliant idea that both wives should be buried together in the same vault.(I can imagine said wives would have had a thing or two to say about that particular egotistical little plan. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in the afterlife.) As the gravediggers lifted Harriet's coffin, "the woodwork fell to pieces and the once-lovely actress's skull fell into the mud at the famed composer's feet. Overcome by shock and revulsion Berlioz fled from the cemetary and was seen by nobody for days afterwards. The drama had ended."
Bloody romantics.
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