Berlioz in Time_ePUB

Berlioz grew up in the provinces of southeastern France. He was not quite eighteen when he arrived in Paris to pursue medical, then musical study. If the formative years had a lasting impact on his life and work as composer, critic, advocate, and adversary, the artistic flame itself...

At Berlioz’s funeral, the eulogy pronounced by the President of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France, Eugène Guillaume, included the following passage:

On the occasion of my lecture to the members of the Berlioz Society, in London, which prompted the present chapter, the distinguished conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner was in the audience. This led me to recall his performance of Les Troyens, at the Châtelet in Paris, in 2003. As an oboe player, I had noticed, among maestro Gardiner’s period instruments, a...

Locker room conversation, in the United States of America, refers to the unelevated discourse that is characteristic of men, even those of educated station, as they shower and dress, after sports, in the room where they have stored their clothes. “Locker” can mean “sleazy” in German, and that is indeed what is at issue: remarks that in French would be “des...

Berlioz, I confess, never became director of the Théâtre-Italien. That he nearly occupied this position, however, seems worth a few minutes’ traffic upon this stage, for the tale speaks in a way that others do not to the composer’s standing in the artistic world of the eighteen-thirties and to his relationship at the time with French officialdom. Indeed, the...

“All politics is local.” Americans know the phrase. Most associate it with Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill (1912–1994),...

In the shadows of Berlioz’s Nuits d’été are persons, places, paintings, and poems once a part of the richly textured fabric of its genesis, now obscured, in the musical world, by the brilliance of the aesthetic object, the enduring artistic...

On December 7, 1846, in his regular column for La Presse, Théophile Gautier concluded a review of La Damnation de Faust, Berlioz’s new “légende dramatique” premiered the day before at the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique, with the sentence we quoted in the previous chapter, the sentence now...

In his magisterial Berlioz and the Romantic Century, Jacques Barzun spoke of the composer’s first voyage to Germany in 1842–1843 as a “musical mission” designed essentially to substantiate the development of dramatic music “on Shakespearean lines” and to...

“Au grand et cher auteur de Roméo et Juliette, l’auteur reconnaissant de Tristan et Isolde”—so reads the handsome dedication on the copy of the full score of Tristan that Wagner sent to Berlioz, The dedication may...

It is a strange and curious phenomenon, I think, that Berlioz’s musical politics, generally...

This little poem—

Much Ado About Nothing, the play upon which Berlioz based his lone opéra-comique, Béatrice et Bénédict, carries a title that is singularly ambiguous: the noun “nothing,” which, for most of us signifies...

He was slender and, in the images we have, seems to have been concerned about his appearance, being well if not always stylishly dressed. But he had few of the attributes that Baudelaire famously attributed to the “dandy,” in particular that “air of frigidity that results from his unshakeable resolve never ever to be moved,” for Berlioz was nothing if not...

It goes without saying, as many have said, that the personality of the biographer of the painter, of the writer, of the musician, has always colored...