SELECTED LETTERS OF BERLIOZ.<i> Edited by Hugh Macdonald</i> .<i> Translated from the French by Roger Nichols</i> .<i> W.W. Norton: 480 pp., $35</i>

It was a source of great satisfaction to me, the first time I went to France, to find the face of Hector Berlioz emblazoned on the 10-franc note. Here was a country that honored its artists, or so I thought. It would be a while before I realized that if you are not on the money, or in the Pantheon--in other words, if you are a living artist--you are next to nothing in France. Fortunately, Berlioz was under no illusions about that, though it pained him every day of his adult life to have to deal with it. “I want to make a name for myself, I want to leave on this earth some traces of my existence; and such is the strength of this feeling, which in itself is nothing if not noble, that I would rather be Gluck or Mehul dead than who I am in the flower of my youth,” the 20-year-old composition student wrote to his father in 1824, articulating, in a way that could hardly have cheered his old man, the very first idee fixe of his life. Other passions would come and go, but the hunger for recognition and approval would gnaw at Berlioz to the end of his days.

In his preface to this new collection of Berlioz’s letters, editor Hugh Macdonald points out that “truth, if it is to be found at all, is surely more readily assembled from a man’s private writings than from the judgments of his peers and contemporaries.” This book contains nearly 500 letters, roughly one-eighth of the composer’s surviving correspondence. And the ring of truth can be heard on every page, from the soaring, Romantic, self-conscious missives in which the young man portrays himself as an artist to the pathetic cries for help of the sick and dying 65-year-old that come feebly at the end.

As a student in high school, I was privileged to encounter Berlioz “face-to-face,” as it were, through one of these letters--though at the time, it was not included in any collection of the composer’s correspondence and was, therefore, all the more personal to me. He was 23. I was 17. I’ll never forget the day my French teacher, Robert J. Fitzpatrick (who later became president of CalArts and is now dean of the School of Arts at Columbia), brought the letter to school, carefully unfolded it and read through it with me. The letter had come down to his wife, Sylvie, through her family; the original recipient, Ferdinand Laforest, was a distant relative who had been a friend of Berlioz when both were in medical school.

A quick look at the postmark, 1827, and the date, Oct. 12, told me I was holding a piece of history. On Sept. 11, 1827, Berlioz had attended a performance of “Hamlet” at the Odeon in which the Irish-born actress, Harriet Smithson, had performed the role of Ophelia. Overwhelmed by her beauty and charisma, he had fallen desperately in love. It had taken him a month to pull himself together long enough to write Laforest about his infatuation:

“[L]et me tell you, you are not acquainted with love, although you say you feel it strongly. That’s not the rage, the fury, the delirium which takes possession of all our faculties and makes us capable of anything; you’re not the sort of man to ruin yourself willingly for the person you love. You’re lucky in that respect and I would not wish on you the intolerable sufferings to which I have been subjected since your departure.”

Here was the Berlioz who would become not only a great composer but also one of the outstanding figures of 19th century French letters experiencing fever, palpitations and an agitation verging on the suicidal. The intensity of his feeling jumped from the page. Artist that he was, Berlioz eventually found a way to channel the emotional upheaval of l’affaire Smithson into something he could control--a “fantastic symphony” that took as its subject the experiences of a young musician in love. The Symphonie Fantastique received its premiere in 1830, and in the two years that followed, Berlioz’s headstrong courtship of Smithson unfolded as if it had been scripted by Balzac. On Oct. 3, 1833, the two were married. But it was not a case of happily ever after. Nothing in Berlioz’s life was.

It has been a joy to renew my acquaintance with Berlioz through these letters, an engrossing experience to look over his shoulder at what he is writing to this or that friend, to the members of his family or to colleagues like Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Macdonald has made Berlioz the work of a lifetime, and his selection of the letters in this volume is well judged. In addition to his lucid preface, about as fine a sketch of Berlioz’s career and character as exists in English, he contributes numerous helpful footnotes and occasional explanatory paragraphs that serve to link events in the composer’s life and travels with the letters that follow. As the translator, Nichols has done an admirable job, though it seems to me he occasionally underestimates the temperature of Berlioz’s prose and sometimes falls into British colloquialisms that don’t serve the American reader or the original document particularly well.

For the most part, however, Nichols is wonderfully well attuned to the style and idiom of Berlioz the correspondent. One reads with delight the famous letter to Mendelssohn, written in the style of James Fenimore Cooper, in which he completes a swap of their batons:

“To the chief Mendelssohn

“Great chief,

“We promised to exchange our tomahawks; here’s mine! It is rough, yours is simple. Only squaws and palefaces like ornamented weapons. Be my brother! And when the great Spirit has sent us hunting in the land of souls, may our warriors hang our tomahawks together over the door of the meeting-house.”

And one sighs through letters like that of March 6, 1854, in which an agonized Berlioz informs his sister Adele of the death of Harriet Smithson:

”. . . What a fearful thing life is! . . . Everything comes back to me all at once, happy and bitter memories alike! Her fine qualities, her cruel demands, her injustices, but also her genius and her unhappiness. . . . Who will take my memory from me? Who will blot out so many pages of the book of my heart. . . . We live such a long time! And then there is Louis, so grown-up, he no longer looks anything like the dear little boy I used to see running up and down these garden paths. Over there is his daguerreotype portrait taken at the age of twelve. It seems to me I have lost that child; the tall one I was embracing six days ago cannot console me for the loss of the other.”

As time went by, Berlioz’s life filled with laments. He had lost his father in 1848 and his sister Nanci in 1850. After Harriet’s death came others, including his sister Adele’s in 1860, his second wife Marie Recio’s in 1862, and, hardest of all, his son Louis’ in 1867. Problems with his own health plagued Berlioz over the last 15 years of his life, and he was chronically short of money. Yet fame, the approval for which he had longed all his life, did not come to Berlioz, at least not in anything like the measure in which it was enjoyed by others whose gifts were trivial in comparison with his. From the start, Berlioz had been too honest to play the game, yet too opinionated to stay out of trouble, and in the latter years of his life, it ended up costing him.

In spite of that, not all was darkness. The affection, warmth and lightness of spirit that emerge in Berlioz’s letters to Liszt, up to about 1859, show that the weight of the world could vanish whenever he felt he was in touch with a kindred spirit. Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, for whom mothering Liszt was apparently not a full-time occupation, became another favorite correspondent in the final 15 years of Berlioz’s life, and it is to her, after all, that we owe the idea of “Les Troyens.” Even the completion of that epic opera, arguably the composer’s greatest accomplishment, must be counted a hollow victory, because Berlioz never got to see the work staged in its entirety.

Yet although the Philistines succeeded in defeating him, or at least in depriving him of numerous opportunities to enjoy the taste of celebrity, Berlioz was still the lion, and they were still hyenas. In the end, Berlioz got what he wanted: recognition. More famous by far than either Gluck or Mehul, he was soon enough recognized, after he was dead, as one of the most original musical thinkers of all time, an assessment that is unlikely to change in years to come. Though he didn’t live to see it, he had a profound influence on French music from the 1870s on, so profound that it’s impossible to conceive of Debussy, Chausson, Dukas and Ravel, to say nothing of Saint-Saens or Bizet, turning out the way they did without him. Nor was his influence limited to France. There could hardly have been the Liszt we know, or any of the Russians, including the St. Petersburg “Five”--Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich--if Berlioz had not been there first.

Not that Berlioz predicted any of this. In fact, he was a notoriously bad prognosticator. And there is something peculiarly satisfying about the irony of his letter of June 1, 1849, to his sister Nanci:

“The day before yesterday we had a kind of riot at the Poissonibre gate. It began at a socialist banquet in which a crowd of uninvited brothers thought it fitting to take part; once their bellies were full the said brothers ran off without paying. That’s practical communism if ever there was. We’ve had two red deputies from the Haut Rhin in 1793 costume, bonnets on heads and sabres at sides; These vile nincompoops imagined they would cause a great sensation in Paris. Everyone who met them dressed up like that laughed in their faces . . . and there wasn’t a single clap of thunder in the heavens. If only one could give socialism another little push in this direction, it would soon be dead of ridicule and all the dogs of France and Navarre would lift their legs on it!”

Ah, Berlioz. . . . On June 1, 1997, 148 years to the day after you wrote that, the Socialists returned to power in France. Right now you’re probably spinning in your grave at the Montmartre Cemetery, under the black-and-gold monument put there to honor you, not by your countrymen but by the English.