Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness 1832-1869 - Softcover

Cairns, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140287272 ISBN 13: 9780140287271

Publisher: Penguin, 2000

Synopsis

This second volume completes David Cairns's extraordinary life of Berlioz (described by the Financial Times as 'one of the great biographies of our day and one of the great feats of literary sympathy with an artistic genius'). Drawing on a wide range of unpublished and published sources, Cairns recreates the vivid everyday reality of Berlioz's life. He tells in detail of the composer's struggles to establish himself in Paris, and shows how his work was created and performed against the grain ofParisian musical life, where Berlioz earned his living by music criticism and was commonly thought of as a journalist. For the first time biographical justice is done to this fascinating, complex, titanic human being.

About this title

Review:

The conclusion to David Cairns's epic biography of Hector Berlioz has been eagerly awaited ever since volume one, Berlioz: the Making of an Artist appeared in 1989. With an achievement as massive as that highly praised volume part of the tension of waiting for the follow-up involves wondering whether Cairns can capture again the sweep, the vividness and the power of his first book. But he has managed to do exactly that.

Cairns picks up the story at the time of Berlioz's marriage to Harriet Smithson in 1833, with whom he had been obsessively infatuated for so long. It's a mournful story, with her alcoholism, the separation in 1844 and her premature death in 1854, Cairns links the vicissitudes of Berlioz's own life directly with his music. The composition of La Morte d'Ophelie marks the symbolic end of their marriage. "The elegaic significance of this infinitely sad melody would be hard to miss". Cairns writes sensitively and evocatively about Berlioz's music, and one of the central pillars of this second volume is a compelling defence of Berlioz's Trojans (1856), his much-maligned and chopped-about masterpiece. Critics of the day were not kind: "so vulgar, so badly designed and so distorted with impossible modulations that one would take it to be the music of a deaf man;" said one. There were many cartoons, which Cairns reprints, along the lines of "New method of killing cattle to be introduced at all slaughterhouses" in which an ox is pictured felled by having The Trojans played to it through a large tuba. But Cairns convincingly demonstrates just how far ahead of his time Berlioz was, and how heroic was his struggle to have this titanic opera performed and accepted in the teeth of persistent obstacles. It is Cairns' opinion that Berlioz, "like the biblical man, was born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards." His biography follows the tragedies and the triumphs of this larger-than-life individual with a narrative force as strong as a good novel. --Adam Roberts

Synopsis:

Berlioz was one of the towering figures of Romanticism: not only was he a great and revolutionary composer, but also the finest conductor 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, the author 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 crowing 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140287272
• ISBN 13: 9780140287271
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 944