Details
BERLIOZ, Hector (1803-1869). Autograph letter signed to his uncle and aunt [Victor and Laure Berlioz], n.p. [Paris], n.d. [1859], 4 pages, 8vo.
A long and chatty letter, written in high spirits on recovering his health ('Me voila sur pieds; ma desolante maladie de nerfs est dissipée, je n'ai plus d'acces d'Hypocondrie, d'Hysteria, je ne veux plus mourir, au contraire. Oui, oui, je le proclame, le docteur Vries ... m'a guéri') and describing a dinner to be held in honour of the doctor and his star patient, 'un veritable Lazare ressuscité', 'notre brave ami Saxe'. The musicians will play the Carnaval Romain, and Meyerbeer will be there. At the previous night's ball at the Hotel de Ville the dance orchestra was as terrible as the crowd, the princess [Marie Clotilde, the wife of the Prince Napoleon] was said to be glum and ungracious, the Princess Mathilde looked like the goddess Cybele, and Berlioz and his wife returned home at four in the morning. On the musical scene, the Prince Napoleon's planned soirée for Berlioz to conduct Les Troyens has been suspended by the Prince's marriage. His work on 'Les Grotesque de la musique' is being printed, and he has a contract to write an opera to inaugurate the theatre at Baden in 1860, while returning there in the present year to give Roméo et Juliette, for which he hopes to engage Madame Viardot [the famous mezzo-soprano, Pauline Viardot-Garcia].
Les Grotesques de la musique, described as 'brief squibs celebrating the bizarreries of the musical world or exploding the vanity and pretensions of performers' (David Cairns, Berlioz (1999), II, page 642), was published in Paris in 1859, and Béatrice and Benedict, composed in 1860, was first performed in Baden two years later. J.H. Vries, a fashionable Eurasian practioner known as 'the black doctor', treated Berlioz in February 1859, after which Berlioz, a frequent sufferer from real -- or perhaps sometimes imaginary -- illnesses, remained free from pain for some time. He had already, as Berlioz describes in unflinching detail, successfully treated the Belgian saxophonist Adolphe Saxe for a tumour on his lip.
A long and chatty letter, written in high spirits on recovering his health ('Me voila sur pieds; ma desolante maladie de nerfs est dissipée, je n'ai plus d'acces d'Hypocondrie, d'Hysteria, je ne veux plus mourir, au contraire. Oui, oui, je le proclame, le docteur Vries ... m'a guéri') and describing a dinner to be held in honour of the doctor and his star patient, 'un veritable Lazare ressuscité', 'notre brave ami Saxe'. The musicians will play the Carnaval Romain, and Meyerbeer will be there. At the previous night's ball at the Hotel de Ville the dance orchestra was as terrible as the crowd, the princess [Marie Clotilde, the wife of the Prince Napoleon] was said to be glum and ungracious, the Princess Mathilde looked like the goddess Cybele, and Berlioz and his wife returned home at four in the morning. On the musical scene, the Prince Napoleon's planned soirée for Berlioz to conduct Les Troyens has been suspended by the Prince's marriage. His work on 'Les Grotesque de la musique' is being printed, and he has a contract to write an opera to inaugurate the theatre at Baden in 1860, while returning there in the present year to give Roméo et Juliette, for which he hopes to engage Madame Viardot [the famous mezzo-soprano, Pauline Viardot-Garcia].
Les Grotesques de la musique, described as 'brief squibs celebrating the bizarreries of the musical world or exploding the vanity and pretensions of performers' (David Cairns, Berlioz (1999), II, page 642), was published in Paris in 1859, and Béatrice and Benedict, composed in 1860, was first performed in Baden two years later. J.H. Vries, a fashionable Eurasian practioner known as 'the black doctor', treated Berlioz in February 1859, after which Berlioz, a frequent sufferer from real -- or perhaps sometimes imaginary -- illnesses, remained free from pain for some time. He had already, as Berlioz describes in unflinching detail, successfully treated the Belgian saxophonist Adolphe Saxe for a tumour on his lip.
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