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musicdeepdive's review
4.75
Outstanding first volume that places Berlioz's eccentricities and the musings of his autobiography in proper context. Clearly a troubled man but there is still mostly positivity in this work, the other shoe having yet to drop for this mercurial figure. Excited to read volume 2.
markk's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
5.0
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.
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