by David Cairns
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~ Hector Berlioz
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The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) by Hector Berlioz |
by John Worthen
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by Elizabeth Norman McKay
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Amazon.co.uk 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
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"What an impossible novel my life is!" Berlioz wrote in 1832 to his friend Albert Du Boys. To his sister Adele, "I am absorbed continually by the strangeness, the romanticness of my situation". What was continually absorbing Berlioz in 1832 was in fact his passionate pursuit of the actress Harriet Smithson, who for so long had resisted him, and whom he at last marries. To begin with, the marriage was a happy one, produced an adored son Louis, and released Berlioz's extraordinary creative energies. But harriet was unable to find work. The marriage became unbalanced. Its end as tragic for them both. "Oh to forget to forget" he wrote after her death. "What can relieve me of memory, blot out all those pages from the book and volume of my heart". The pursuit of love, and its defining place in Berlioz's life, is one of the great themes of Berlioz: servitude and greatness. It is only one among many brilliantly traced by the author, Cairns describes the genesis of the famous works of Berlioz's maturity - Benvenuto Cellini, the requiem, Romeo and Juliet, The Damnation of Faust and above all the crowning masterpiece The Trojans, neglected or mutilated for a century after its composition and which Cairns shows emerging from the classical passions of Berlioz's adolescence - which exceptional insight and understanding. rarely have the creative processes of a great artist been so amply revealed. But Berlioz stands in this volume not simply as a great and revolutionary composer: he was, in the opinion of Hans von Bulow, Sir Charles Halle and many others, "the finest conductor of his age", called upon all over Europe to perform above all Gluck and Beethoven as well as his own works. And it is evident, in this book perhaps for the first time, that he was also one of the finest critics and writers about music of the 19th century, in Cairns's opinion the finest until Shaw: "no one else combined his knowledge of music and the musical world with his command of language". The power and wit of Berlioz's writing, in his letters as well as his criticism, are one of the delights of the book. Struggles for artistic recognition and some measure of financial security, are the other two great themes of the book.
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