human
He was a man, Horatio. I cannot do better than transcribe the composer's interesting account of the first performance, taken from his _Autobiography_:
gpt
All went splendidly at rehearsal; everything seemed to smile, when, with my usual luck, an hour before the concert, there broke over Paris the worst storm that had been known for fifty years. The streets were flooded, practically impassable, and for the first half of the concert when my _Tempest_, damned _Tempest_, was being played, there were not more than three hundred people in the place. Just Berlioz's luck! Something nearly always went wrong with his work in Paris. In London, Petrograd, Berlin, anywhere else, he was immensely successful, but in Paris never quite a success, even at the height of his fame. The second performance, the following year, was much less unfortunate. Of the work itself Berlioz writes:
human
It is new, fresh, grand, sweet, tender, surprising.