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Berlioz: Volume One: The Making of an Artist, 1803-1832 (1989)

di David Cairns

Serie: Cairns's Berlioz (Volume 1)

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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 award-winning biography.… (altro)
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In the spring of 1828, Beethoven’s Third Symphony was performed in Paris for the first time. For those in attendance the music was a revelation, and for none more so than for a 24-year-old student at the Paris Conservatoire named Hector Berlioz. It was here, as David Cairns explains, that the man regarded by many as the father of modern orchestration first appreciated the value of symphonic music as a dramatic form. It was an important step in his development as a composer, the chronicling of which is the focus of Cairns’s hefty volume covering the first three decades of Berlioz’s life. Through it he traces Berlioz’s musical education and his emergence as a composer of renown, one destined to become one of the greatest of classical music.

Before he could embark upon his career as a composer, however, young Hector had to overcome the opposition of his parents. As a doctor and a member of the provincial gentry, Louis Berlioz hoped that his eldest son would follow in his footsteps and choose a career in either the medical or legal professions. Yet while Hector did well in his medical training in Paris, every free minute was spent in attending the musical and theatrical performances in France’s cultural capital. As Cairns details, French music during this period was tied closely with theatrical performance and was overshadowed by the richer and more innovative scene in central Europe. This mattered little to Berlioz, who was so taken by the possibilities of composition that he convinced his parents to support him in his efforts to gain a musical education.

Louis hoped that Hector’s passion for music would pass, or that he would return to a more sensible career choice once he discovered he couldn’t make a go of it. Instead Berlioz thrived in his studies. Cairns explores closely Berlioz’s relationship with the composer Jean-François Le Seuer, who taught Berlioz as a private student for over three years before he was admitted to the Conservatoire in 1826, and who as a professor there continued to mentor him. Though Berlioz benefited from his studies with Le Seuer and Anton Reicha, much of his education took place through attendance of performances in the city’s theaters, where he encountered both Beethoven’s music and the plays of William Shakespeare. Whereas Beethoven inspired him Shakespeare served as source material of some of Berlioz’s ideas, which he immediately began developing in his compositions.

While Berlioz’s growing circle of friends appreciated his gifts, translating that into a career proved challenging. Here the problem lay with the conservatism of the Paris musical scene. Opportunities for performances were restricted by the number of venues approved by the government. Moreover, success in one form of music didn’t translate easily into acceptance of his other musical inspirations, making it a struggle simply to win credibility for the wide variety of musical forms in which Berlioz experimented. It was through a restraint imposed in order to play the game that allowed Berlioz to win the coveted Prix de Rome in 1830, which allowed him to study in Rome at the French Academy there. This proved a stay in which little of note was produced but where the seeds of many of his later works were sown, all of which would blossom over the remainder of his long and successful career.

Cairns ends the book with the triumph of Berlioz’s concert at the Conservatoire in 1832 and his meeting with Harriet Smithson, the Anglo-Irish actress who would be his first wife. Much lay ahead for Berlioz, yet it is a testament to Cairns’s skills as a writer that many readers will finish his book not exhausted by the detail but eager to press on to the second volume. His description of Berlioz’s life is extensively researched and richly insightful, yet moves with a grace that makes reading about it a pleasure. Though a knowledge of music, especially of classical music, is necessary to get the most out of Cairns’s analysis of Berlioz’s achievements, his book is rewarding reading just for the details of Berlioz’s life or the cultural history of 19th century France more generally. It all makes for a magnificent book that is not only unlikely to be surpassed as a study of Berlioz but is one of the best biographies of a composer ever written. Nobody interested in Berlioz or classical music more generally can afford to ignore it. ( )
  MacDad | Feb 1, 2022 |
At over 1500 pages, this monumental two-volume biography of France's greatest Romantic composer well deserves the accolades it will surely receive from musicologists. Cairns, chief music critic of the (London) Sunday Times from 1983 to 1992 and a distinguished visiting professor at the University of California at Davis, wrote the first volume more than ten years ago and published it only in Britain. Here, he presents a revised and corrected edition for American readers, along with the long-awaited second volume, which is nearly as voluminous. The sequel picks up the biographical thread in 1833 with the introduction of Harriet Smithson, the English actress who became Berlioz's muse, obsession, and wife. While the accounts of their tempestuous marriage make for fascinating and, at times, hair-raising reading, some of the most memorable passages are by Berlioz himself. His prose reveals him to have been a somewhat reluctant, often caustic, but always perceptive music critic. Both volumes are pure life narratives; there is no musical analysis, nor are there musical examples. At times readers, awash in biographical detail, may wish for more information on the music itself, but Cairns's prose is so elegant and readable, his subject so fascinating, and his scholarship so impressive that they will forgive him. Truly a definitive study, these two volumes belong in all major collections.
-Larry A. Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA

Cairns tells the story with sober elegance and uncommon sympathy. He is a marvelous guide to the musical life and aesthetic arguments of 19th-century Europe and shows Berlioz as a man of his times.
  antimuzak | Jul 2, 2006 |
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, the Fantastic 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.

This first volume of David Cairns's biography of Berlioz, first published a decade ago (when it won the Royal Philharmonic Society's Music Awards, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year and the British Academy's Derek Allen Prize) and now reissued in a revised and corrected second edition, transform our view of the composer of the "Fantastic Symphony" and has established itself as one of the outstanding biographies of any musician in English: "it is already clear", wrote one critic, "that Cairns is doing for Berlioz what Ernest Newman did for Wagner". In this book the author describes with unprecedented intimacy, affection and respect the early years of one of France's greatest artists. In researching the life, Cairns has had access to a wealth of family papers. He is able to portray all the people close to Berlioz in his boyhood and to evoke a detailed picture of their existence in an d around La Cote St Andre in the foothills of the French Alps. No artist's achievement connects more directly with early experience than that of Berlioz, whose passionate sensibility began to absorb the material of his art long before he had heard any musical ensemble other than the local town band, and few artists have had to fight their way through a more intense family drama in order to follow their vocation. To be given an authentic sense of the place and the people involved, and of Berlioz's response to them, is to be taken to the heart of the man. The same is true of Berlioz's student years in Paris, where he tried to please his father by attending medical school but soon found the pull of music irresistible. He immersed himself in the works of Gluck and Spontini; studied with Jean-Francois Le Sueur, at first privately, then at the Conservatoire; won the Prix de Rome at his fifth attempt; and spent the obligatory year in Italy. Those simple statements cover a turmoil of commitment, defiance, experiment, frustration and achievement, all of which Cairns brings to life.
  antimuzak | Oct 29, 2005 |
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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 award-winning biography.

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