Berlioz series
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Berlioz series |
|---|---|
| Author: | David Cairns |
| Genres: | |
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Life stories come in all sizes, from the smallest notice in a dictionary of musical biography to largest multi-volume epic. Fitting form to subject, David Cairns’s enormous retelling of Berlioz’s—of which this is volume one (running from 1803-1832)—is on the grandest possible scale. It contains a tremendous amount of fascinating detail, and conveys a real sense of what it was like to grow up in France in the aftermath of the Napoleonic defeats. But above all it is a completely convincing portrait of the character of Berlioz himself, and of his sense of his own artistic mission. He lived passionately, sometimes gushingly. When he fell in love, for instance, he did so hyperbolically (“my heart expands and my imagination struggles to comprehend this intensity of happiness”);he suffered amorous reversals with melodramatic intensity (“wandering the streets at night with a bitter grief that haunts me like a red-hot iron on my breast”), and he spoke with gusto of the effect great art had on him(“I came out of Hamlet shaken to the core by the experience; I vowed I should not expose myself a second time to the flame of Shakespeare’s genius”). But one of the nice things in Cairns’s account is the way the ordinary neatly undercuts Berlioz’s self-dramatisation; for instance the letter to his mother that begins “thank you, dear Mama, for the handkerchiefs. What I am short of is stockings.”
Volume One takes us up to the composition of Berlioz’s early triumph, theFantastic Symphony, which Cairns describes in powerful prose. But most absorbing are the accounts of Berlioz’s all-consuming love affairs: his boyhood infatuation with Estelle Dubeuf, his obsessive love for the English actress Harriet Smithson, for whom he learned to speak English, and his more realistic love for the pianist Camille Moke. You finish reading it eager to carry the story on in volume two, Servitude and Greatness.—Adam Roberts
Series Titles
Berlioz: Volume 1. The Making of an Artist, 1803-1832
This biography of composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) describes with unprecedented intimacy, affection, and respect the life of one of France’s greatest artists. After long being regarded as an oddity and an eccentric figure, Berlioz is now being accepted into the ranks of the great composers. Based on a wealth of previously unpublished sources, and on a profound understanding of the humanity of his subject, David Cairns’s book provides a full account of this extraordinary and powerfully attractive man. Berlioz, Volume I, previously published only in Britain, is now available to American readers in a revised edition, together with the eagerly awaited, new Volume II. These two volumes together comprise a monumental biographical achievement, sure to stand as the definitive Berlioz biography.In researching Berlioz’s life, Cairns has had access to unpublished family papers, and in Volume I he is able to portray all the people close to Berlioz in his boyhood, and to evoke a detailed picture of their lives in and around La Cte St.-Andr in the foothills of the French Alps.…
Berlioz: Volume 2. Servitude and Greatness, 1832-1869
This biography of composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) describes with unprecedented intimacy, affection, and respect the life of one of France’s greatest artists. After long being regarded as an oddity and an eccentric figure, Berlioz is now being accepted into the ranks of the great composers. Based on a wealth of previously unpublished sources, and on a profound understanding of the humanity of his subject, David Cairns’s book provides a full account of this extraordinary and powerfully attractive man.
Volume II follows Berlioz’s life from 1832 to his death in 1869, his most active years as a composer, conductor, and critic. This volume provides telling portraits of those close to Berlioz: his two wives, his son and his sisters, his friends and colleagues, fellow composers and critics. Cairns vividly evokes Berlioz’s music and the music-making world of nineteenth-century Paris. Volume II also includes chapters on Wagner, Berlioz’s career as a critic, the composer’s concert tours in Germany, Russia, and England, and much more.
