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Berlioz #2
Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness, 1832-1869
Berlioz was one of the towering figures of Romanticism: not only was he a great and revolutionary composer, but also the finest composer of his day and an outstanding critic and writer. Yet throughout his life he struggled for money and his music was persistently reviled in his native France. With exceptional insight and sympathy, David Cairns draws together the major strands of Berlioz's life: his tempestuous marriage to the actress Harriet Smithson; the genesis of his famous works, including the Requiem, Romeo and Juliet and his crowning masterpiece The Trojans; his friendships with Mendelssohn, Liszt, Princess Wittgenstein and Wagner; and, finally, his last years haunted once again by personal tragedy. Here, as never before, is Berlioz the artist - and the man.
944 pages, Paperback
First published November 4, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 25, 2023
As he lay on his deathbed in March 1869, the last words the French composer Hector Berlioz spoke were, “Enfin on va jouer ma musique" – “They are finally going to play my music.” Though David Cairns spends the epilogue of the second volume of his superb biography of Berlioz analyzing this statement, its meaning is clear enough from his description of Berlioz’s public career in France. For as Cairns details, one of the tragedies of Berlioz’s life is that his music was acclaimed practically everywhere but in Paris, where he wore himself down in his lifelong struggle to win acceptance and fortune for his work.
This struggle becomes even more incomprehensible when compared to the widespread acclaim Berlioz received for his music throughout Europe. Though not universal, the adulation he received throughout Europe proved an essential prop to his career, providing him with an income he desperately needed for his financial obligations. These had expanded in 1832 with his marriage to the English actress Harriet Smithson. Once the toast of the Parisian theater, her career was in decline by the time she met Berlioz in 1831. When the book begins, the two are settling down into married life faced with the problem of how to pay the money the Berliozes owed to Smithson’s creditors. This proved challenging, as while Berlioz enjoyed a reputation as a rising composer, he faced a perennial difficulty in staging concerts, the proceeds of which were the main source of income for artists at that time.
Faced with such difficulties, Berlioz turned instead to another field: journalism. This proved profitable enough for the Berliozes, despite taking Hector away from his composing. As a music critic himself Cairns is ideally suited to evaluate this aspect of Berlioz’s career, and he gives high marks to the high quality of his subject’s writing. This may have earned him enemies, but with a young son and his wife’s acting career ending the income was one that Berlioz could ill afford to decline.
Nevertheless, Berlioz continued composing. These were the years of his Requiem and of his opera Benvenuto Cellini. Because of them, by the end of the 1830s Berlioz was at the height of his popularity in Paris. Yet financial success still eluded him, thanks to the poor quality of the performers, the limited availability of venues and the restrictions imposed by the French government. The situation led him by the early 1840s to look outside of France for performance opportunities. These he soon found in Germany, where he discovered the skilled orchestras and rapturous audiences missing at home. This established a pattern that would define the next quarter-century of his life, as he enjoyed acclaim everywhere except the one place that mattered the most to him.
Part of the problem for Berlioz was the changing tastes of his Parisian audiences. By the 1840s the fad for Romantic music had run its course in the French capital, which affected negatively the reception of his oratorio The Damnation of Faust, his major work during that decade. Performing outside of France remained profitable, but the task of traveling and organizing performances took time away from composition. It wasn’t until 1856 that Berlioz began work on what Cairns regards as his magnum opus, an epic opera based on the Aeneid called The Trojans. Though completed two years later, the sheer scale of it – five acts that took five hours to perform – made it difficult to stage. Berlioz spent the next five years attempting to get it produced, only to see it performed in a truncated version in 1863. The dispiriting result, coupled with Berlioz’s increasingly poor health, brought an end to his career as a composer, just six years before his death.
Though shunned as a composer by many of his countrymen during his lifetime, in the decades since his death Berlioz has come to be regarded by them as one of the greatest artists in their nation’s long history, thus fulfilling his deathbed prediction. It is in Cairns’s biography, however, that he had fully received his due, In it he gives an account of Berlioz’s life that is sympathetic while remaining critical in it judgments. He supplements his text with long extracts from Berlioz’s articles and correspondence, giving his readers a sense of his own voice as a writer, It makes for a masterpiece of scholarship that enriches not just our understanding of the life of one of the great classical composers but of his music and the broader culture in which it was produced. No one interested in Berlioz or in the music of his era can afford to ignore it.
This struggle becomes even more incomprehensible when compared to the widespread acclaim Berlioz received for his music throughout Europe. Though not universal, the adulation he received throughout Europe proved an essential prop to his career, providing him with an income he desperately needed for his financial obligations. These had expanded in 1832 with his marriage to the English actress Harriet Smithson. Once the toast of the Parisian theater, her career was in decline by the time she met Berlioz in 1831. When the book begins, the two are settling down into married life faced with the problem of how to pay the money the Berliozes owed to Smithson’s creditors. This proved challenging, as while Berlioz enjoyed a reputation as a rising composer, he faced a perennial difficulty in staging concerts, the proceeds of which were the main source of income for artists at that time.
Faced with such difficulties, Berlioz turned instead to another field: journalism. This proved profitable enough for the Berliozes, despite taking Hector away from his composing. As a music critic himself Cairns is ideally suited to evaluate this aspect of Berlioz’s career, and he gives high marks to the high quality of his subject’s writing. This may have earned him enemies, but with a young son and his wife’s acting career ending the income was one that Berlioz could ill afford to decline.
Nevertheless, Berlioz continued composing. These were the years of his Requiem and of his opera Benvenuto Cellini. Because of them, by the end of the 1830s Berlioz was at the height of his popularity in Paris. Yet financial success still eluded him, thanks to the poor quality of the performers, the limited availability of venues and the restrictions imposed by the French government. The situation led him by the early 1840s to look outside of France for performance opportunities. These he soon found in Germany, where he discovered the skilled orchestras and rapturous audiences missing at home. This established a pattern that would define the next quarter-century of his life, as he enjoyed acclaim everywhere except the one place that mattered the most to him.
Part of the problem for Berlioz was the changing tastes of his Parisian audiences. By the 1840s the fad for Romantic music had run its course in the French capital, which affected negatively the reception of his oratorio The Damnation of Faust, his major work during that decade. Performing outside of France remained profitable, but the task of traveling and organizing performances took time away from composition. It wasn’t until 1856 that Berlioz began work on what Cairns regards as his magnum opus, an epic opera based on the Aeneid called The Trojans. Though completed two years later, the sheer scale of it – five acts that took five hours to perform – made it difficult to stage. Berlioz spent the next five years attempting to get it produced, only to see it performed in a truncated version in 1863. The dispiriting result, coupled with Berlioz’s increasingly poor health, brought an end to his career as a composer, just six years before his death.
Though shunned as a composer by many of his countrymen during his lifetime, in the decades since his death Berlioz has come to be regarded by them as one of the greatest artists in their nation’s long history, thus fulfilling his deathbed prediction. It is in Cairns’s biography, however, that he had fully received his due, In it he gives an account of Berlioz’s life that is sympathetic while remaining critical in it judgments. He supplements his text with long extracts from Berlioz’s articles and correspondence, giving his readers a sense of his own voice as a writer, It makes for a masterpiece of scholarship that enriches not just our understanding of the life of one of the great classical composers but of his music and the broader culture in which it was produced. No one interested in Berlioz or in the music of his era can afford to ignore it.
November 6, 2017
This is the second volume of the definitive English biography of Hector Berlioz. It has been almost a year and a half since I finished the first volume; because it was so long I kept putting other books ahead of it, which I need to learn not to do. This volume begins with his marriage to Harriet Smithson, and ends with his death; it covers the period of most of his important works. The works are all discussed, but without too much technical musical detail; the focus is on the life of the composer rather than the music itself, unlike for instance Abert's biography of Mozart, which it resembles in length. The book avoids taking too romantic an approach, which is a temptation with Berlioz especially, and clears up various misconceptions about his life and music, such as his relationships with Liszt and Wagner. One advantage of my procrastination is that I was reading this at the same time as I am working my way through Balzac's novels; Berlioz was a friend of Balzac, so I was reading nonfiction and fiction about the same period of French history.
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January 28, 2012http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7chHN...
Yes. Nice to see it put so succinctly, and that I'm indeed in great company, as I never doubted.
Yes. Nice to see it put so succinctly, and that I'm indeed in great company, as I never doubted.
October 10, 2021
This was an extraordinary, towering and (insofar as biographies can ever be this) definitive account of Berlioz's life and music. It isn't overly musicological, sketching in the character of pieces in a way that is perfectly accessible. This is to its advantage, as it lays out a convincing account of Berlioz's Romanticism over a period when Romanticism itself was challenged by history. The result is an impressive account of the consistency of Berlioz's vision, against earlier claims of his wild Romantic youth versus a more austere (his word was 'architectural') old age/decline, that also outlines how that consistency led him latterly to appear on occasion surprisingly (and perhaps undeservedly) conservative.
Is it the last word? Almost certainly not. I'd like to see something specifically on Berlioz's complex politics - yes, he became a supporter of Napoléon III, but seemingly from lack of confidence (based on his experiences with Parisian officialdom during the Second Republic) that the Republic could provide any support for the arts, and this happened even while making some acute comments (quoted here) both on the character of (particularly colonial) relations and on the way some 'radical' figures had simply abandoned those who followed them. I'm also going to have to find something specifically on Berlioz's bitterly witty humour, because - in correspondence especially - he's really sharp and funny.
It's magnificent, and I'm surprised to find that I love Hector even more than I did before I started volume 1.
Is it the last word? Almost certainly not. I'd like to see something specifically on Berlioz's complex politics - yes, he became a supporter of Napoléon III, but seemingly from lack of confidence (based on his experiences with Parisian officialdom during the Second Republic) that the Republic could provide any support for the arts, and this happened even while making some acute comments (quoted here) both on the character of (particularly colonial) relations and on the way some 'radical' figures had simply abandoned those who followed them. I'm also going to have to find something specifically on Berlioz's bitterly witty humour, because - in correspondence especially - he's really sharp and funny.
It's magnificent, and I'm surprised to find that I love Hector even more than I did before I started volume 1.
December 12, 2023
Heavy stuff, at times. Triumphant, at others. This is the dichotomy of Berlioz, and well-worth your time is it ever.
February 13, 2015
See my comments on the first volume of this two book set.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews