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Love Letters from London

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Hector Berlioz is considered a romantic composer. His letters reveal that he was also a romantic man. For example, here’s one he wrote from London to a fellow musician on November 10th, 1847:

“Would you believe that in St. Petersburg I fell in love, truly and absurdly, with a member of your chorus? You can laugh here, to a full orchestral accompaniment in a major key. All right now, don’t be put off. I continue. I am in love poetically,

completely, and altogether innocently–interpret that any way you want–with a young girl–not all that young, who said to me, ‘I’ll write to you,’ and who, referring to her mother’s obsession with getting her married, added, ‘It’s a bore!’

“How many walks we took together in the outskirts of Petersburg and out in to the countryside, between nine and eleven o’clock at night! What bitters I shed when, like Marguerite in Faust, she said, ‘For heaven’s sake, I don’t know what you see in me. I’m only a poor young girl beneath your class. There’s no way you can love me like this,’ etcetera, etcetera.

“But it’s not only possible, it’s true, and I thought I would die of despair when I passed the Grand Theater on the coach out of St. Petersburg. And finding no letter from her in Berlin made me downright sick. She promised that she would write to me. And in Paris, too, no news. I’ve written, but no reply. Now that’s a bore!

“I know you have a kind heart, so stop laughing. I’m crying genuine tears as I write this. Kindly pass on to her the enclosed note, and I’ll tell her, too, how unhappy her silence is making me. No doubt she’s married by now.

“Oh! God, I see us still on the banks of the Neva at sunset! What a burst of passion!”

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