Berlioz: Volume One: The Making of an Artist, 1803-1832 - Softcover

Cairns, David

4.52

42 ratings by Goodreads

9780571273027: Berlioz: Volume One: The Making of an Artist, 1803-1832

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571273025 ISBN 13: 9780571273027

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2010

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'David Cairns has a wonderful story to tell and he tells it superbly well ... rich in detail and imbued with imaginative insights that stem from love. It is also written with an enviable blend of grace and energy.' Observer

No artist's achievement connects more directly with early experience than that of Berlioz. David Cairns draws on a wealth of family papers to recreate in authentic and intimate detail the provincial milieu of Berlioz's boyhood, showing how the son of a village doctor was already transforming himself into the composer of the Fantastic Symphony. Berlioz's desperate attempts to win his father's approval for his vocation, his struggles to establish himself on the Parisian musical scene, and his passionate pursuit of love are all brought vividly to life in this first volume of David Cairns's acclaimed biography, winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society's Music Award and the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year.

'In David Cairns, Berlioz has found a biographer who shares his sense of scale. There is not a dull or redundant page in the whole book. Cairns has lived, breathed and dreamt Berlioz for more than twenty years. He has visited the places Berlioz visited and read the books Berlioz read ... You would no more want to read a slimmed-down version of this book than you would an abridged version of David Copperfield.'
Sunday Telegraph

'Essential reading, not only for the ardent Berliozian but for anyone with an interest in the history of Romanticism.' Guardian

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Review:

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

Review:

Named a "Notable Book of 2000" by the "New York Times Book Review

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