Berlioz: The Making of an Artist, 1803-1832

Berlioz #1

by David Cairns

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Good, A very good, clean and sound copy in brown cloth boards with gilt title on spine and dust jacket which is a little rubbed. 1803-1832: the making of an artist. 586 p., [24] p. of plates : ill., facsims., music, port.s ; 24 cm.. . Includes index. p. 506-510

Genres: Music, Biography, Nonfiction, France

586 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

David Adam Cairns is a British journalist, non-fiction writer, and musician, widely regarded as a leading authority on Hector Berlioz. The son of neurosurgeon Sir Hugh Cairns, he co-founded the Chelsea Opera Group in 1950 with Stephen Gray, presenting Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Oxford under a young Colin Davis, with whom he later championed Berlioz’s works. Cairns served as classical programme coordinator for Philips Records (1967–1972), providing sleeve notes for Davis’s landmark Berlioz recordings. His English translation of Berlioz’s Mémoires was published in 1969. Cairns held prominent journalism roles, including music critic and arts editor for The Spectator and chief music critic of the Sunday Times (1983–1992), and contributed to the Evening Standard, Financial Times, and New Statesman. His two-volume biography of Berlioz—The Making of an Artist 1803–1832 (1989) and Servitude and Greatness 1832–1869 (1999)—received widespread acclaim and multiple awards. He founded the Thorington Players in 1983 and has written on composers including Mozart, emphasizing the emotional depth of their music. Cairns was appointed CBE (1997), elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2001), and named Officier and later Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his contributions to French music.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the spring of 1828, Beethoven’s Third Symphony was performed in Paris for the first time. For those in attendance the music was a revelation, and for none more so than for a 24-year-old student at the Paris Conservatoire named Hector Berlioz. It was here, as David Cairns explains, that the man regarded by many as the father of modern orchestration first appreciated the value of symphonic music as a dramatic form. It was an important step in his development as a composer, the chronicling of which is the focus of Cairns’s hefty volume covering the first three decades of Berlioz’s life. Through it he traces Berlioz’s musical education and his emergence as a composer of renown, one destined to become one of the greatest of classical music.

Before he could embark upon his career as a composer, however, young Hector had to overcome the opposition of his parents. As a doctor and a member of the provincial gentry, Louis Berlioz hoped that his eldest son would follow in his footsteps and choose a career in either the medical or legal professions. Yet while Hector did well in his medical training in Paris, every free minute was spent in attending the musical and theatrical performances in France’s cultural capital. As Cairns details, French music during this period was tied closely with theatrical performance and was overshadowed by the richer and more innovative scene in central Europe. This mattered little to Berlioz, who was so taken by the possibilities of composition that he convinced his parents to support him in his efforts to gain a musical education.

Louis hoped that Hector’s passion for music would pass, or that he would return to a more sensible career choice once he discovered he couldn’t make a go of it. Instead Berlioz thrived in his studies. Cairns explores closely Berlioz’s relationship with the composer Jean-François Le Seuer, who taught Berlioz as a private student for over three years before he was admitted to the Conservatoire in 1826, and who as a professor there continued to mentor him. Though Berlioz benefited from his studies with Le Seuer and Anton Reicha, much of his education took place through attendance of performances in the city’s theaters, where he encountered both Beethoven’s music and the plays of William Shakespeare. Whereas Beethoven inspired him Shakespeare served as source material of some of Berlioz’s ideas, which he immediately began developing in his compositions.

While Berlioz’s growing circle of friends appreciated his gifts, translating that into a career proved challenging. Here the problem lay with the conservatism of the Paris musical scene. Opportunities for performances were restricted by the number of venues approved by the government. Moreover, success in one form of music didn’t translate easily into acceptance of his other musical inspirations, making it a struggle simply to win credibility for the wide variety of musical forms in which Berlioz experimented. It was through a restraint imposed in order to play the game that allowed Berlioz to win the coveted Prix de Rome in 1830, which allowed him to study in Rome at the French Academy there. This proved a stay in which little of note was produced but where the seeds of many of his later works were sown, all of which would blossom over the remainder of his long and successful career.

Cairns ends the book with the triumph of Berlioz’s concert at the Conservatoire in 1832 and his meeting with Harriet Smithson, the Anglo-Irish actress who would be his first wife. Much lay ahead for Berlioz, yet it is a testament to Cairns’s skills as a writer that many readers will finish his book not exhausted by the detail but eager to press on to the second volume. His description of Berlioz’s life is extensively researched and richly insightful, yet moves with a grace that makes reading about it a pleasure. Though a knowledge of music, especially of classical music, is necessary to get the most out of Cairns’s analysis of Berlioz’s achievements, his book is rewarding reading just for the details of Berlioz’s life or the cultural history of 19th century France more generally. It all makes for a magnificent book that is not only unlikely to be surpassed as a study of Berlioz but is one of the best biographies of a composer ever written. Nobody interested in Berlioz or classical music more generally can afford to ignore it.

[Monthly Book Group · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much of the book has the quality of an early nineteenth century French novel, although from time to time it breaks off from novel mode and goes into musicology. It is also a portrait of a creative person. The roominess of the book is enjoyable, as one relives in detail a bygone era. It sheds interesting light on Romanticism, and also has considerable historical interest, in its portrayal of revolutions (and the disillusion that followed them) and the post-Napoleonic era. All felt it was, in the main, very well written. For example, it brought alive rural life in La Cote St Andre and in Italy, student life in Paris, Berlioz’ relations with friends, family and lovers, and the incredibly negative and conservative French establishment.

It is a formidable work of scholarship to produce such an exhaustive study, nearly forty years after the only other major biography, and the author has left no stone unturned in examining sources and contemporary writings. He displays a deep knowledge of literature as well as music. Even to the non-musical expert, it is intriguing to read of how musical form has changed with Romanticism, and how it had been commonplace in France to adapt foreign works to local taste. He is also very perceptive in how he deduces people’s psychology from his source material – for example in working out the reasons for Berlioz’ father’s opposition to his musical career.

But does the book need to be so long? Although in some places he belabours points unnecessarily, we concluded that the author had given priority to writing a major academic study rather than a novel or a popular biography, and therefore was right to go into exhaustive detail.

This is an extract from a review at http://monthlybookgroup.wordpress.com/. Our reviews are also to be found at http://monthlybookgroup.blogspot.com/

[Alex Stephenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding first volume that places Berlioz's eccentricities and the musings of his autobiography in proper context. Clearly a troubled man but there is still mostly positivity in this work, the other shoe having yet to drop for this mercurial figure. Excited to read volume 2.

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first volume of Cairns' two volume biography of Hector Berlioz, this covers his childhood at La Cote Andres, his student days in Paris, the composition of his early works through the Symphonie fantastique, and his stay in Italy as winner of the Prix de Rome. It ends on the eve of his first concert after his return to Paris.

Although I have read Berlioz' own Memoires, this goes into far more detail and gives comprehensible reasons for actions that in the Memoires just seemed bizarre Romantic postures. Cairns was also interesting in that he emphasized the classical influences on Berlioz' music rather than just the Romanticism.

I am simultaneously reading a biography of Berlioz' somewhat older contemporary and fellow Dauphinois Henri Beyle (Stendhal) and the comparison is interesting (the Stendhal biography by Josephson does not mention Berlioz, but this book mentions Stendhal frequently.) Both men were born in the vicinity of Grenoble and "escaped" to Paris; both were materialists and atheists at odds with their more conservative families; both were strongly influenced by the Revolution and the Napoleonic era (although Berlioz was of course too young to have experienced the one directly or participated in the other, unlike Stendhal); both spent periods of "exile" in the Papal States (Stendhal was an Italophile, while Berlioz' impressions were mostly negative); both had a love-hate relationship with Pars; both were hampered in their artistic careers by the bureaucracies of the Restoration and the bourgeois monarchy; and both spent most of their lives "in love", mostly unsuccessfully.

I hope to read the second volume in the next few months.

[Wendell Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great read. The critic, H.H. Robbins Landon, says this is the best book ever written about music. This is a large book but it is marvelously written. Cairns is the only writer that compares to the great Will Durant, in that anywhere you open the book you will find something of interest.

[M. Ritchey]

real good. The newly-canonical biography of this great, great dude. If you like biographies you will totally love this one--you don't need to know anything about music to go deep with it. Too bad it's like 5,000 pages long (this is volume one).