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Berlioz and His World
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Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2024
About this book
A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival.
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our musical solar system,” the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange—and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre and form, and too difficult to analyze. He was, in many ways, a composer without a world.
Berlioz and His World takes a deep dive into the composer’s complex legacy, tracing lines between his musical and literary output and the scientific, sociological, technological, and political influences that shaped him. Comprising nine essays covering key facets of Berlioz’s contribution and six short “object lessons” meant as conversation starters, the book reveals Berlioz as a richly intersectional figure. His very difficulty, his tendency to straddle the worlds of composer, conductor, and critic, is revealed as a strength, inviting new lines of cross-disciplinary inquiry and a fresh look at his European and American reception.
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our musical solar system,” the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange—and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre and form, and too difficult to analyze. He was, in many ways, a composer without a world.
Berlioz and His World takes a deep dive into the composer’s complex legacy, tracing lines between his musical and literary output and the scientific, sociological, technological, and political influences that shaped him. Comprising nine essays covering key facets of Berlioz’s contribution and six short “object lessons” meant as conversation starters, the book reveals Berlioz as a richly intersectional figure. His very difficulty, his tendency to straddle the worlds of composer, conductor, and critic, is revealed as a strength, inviting new lines of cross-disciplinary inquiry and a fresh look at his European and American reception.
Author / Editor information
Francesca Brittan is associate professor of music at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz and coeditor of The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity, 1800–1930. She serves as coeditor of the Journal of Musicology and general editor of the series Recent Researches in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music for A-R Editions. Sarah Hibberd is the Stanley Hugh Badock Chair of Music at the University of Bristol. She is the author of French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination and coeditor of Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880. She serves as coeditor of the Cambridge Opera Journal and is on the editorial board of Music & Letters.
Reviews
"In the volume, Brittan and Hibberd pursue an engaging and enticing mode of organization, one that will surely appeal to musicologists, Berlioz afficionados, and music enthusiasts alike. . . Berlioz and His World serves the admirable role of providing 'starting points for further scholarship, inclusive conversation, and a shared contemplation' of Berlioz’s 'rich histories and futures', a particularly timely goal when Berlioz, lacking a 'world' in his own age, has increasingly become a part of ours."
— Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library AssociationTopics
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Frontmatter
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Contents
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Permissions and Credits
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction: Berlioz and the Pantheon
1 - ESSAYS I
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The Language of Prophecy in Les Troyens
22 -
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“Ossianic Sounds”: Berlioz on Memory
49 -
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Berlioz contra Rousseau: Nature, Culture, and la musique descriptive
71 - OBJECT LESSONS I
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Berlioz’s Virgil
96 -
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Inevitable Antagonists: Berlioz and Donizetti
107 -
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Hearing the Hostias, Rehearing the Requiem
115 - ESSAYS II
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Orchestral Futurisms: Berlioz and Science Fiction
128 -
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Passing the Baton: Conducting Masculinity in La damnation de Faust
155 -
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On Berlioz’s Subterranean Operations: Toward a Nineteenth-Century Media Logic
181 - OBJECT LESSONS II
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Euphonian Sound and Fury, Signifying Something
202 -
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Berlioz: Conductor and One-Man Band
209 -
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“Je crois en vous”
219 - ESSAYS III
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American Episodes in the Life of the Artist
228 -
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A Comet in the Musical Sky: Ferdinand Hiller on Hector Berlioz
259 -
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Intimate Beauty and Sublime Grandeur: Sound and Space in the Music of Berlioz
285 -
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Index
329 -
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Notes on the Contributors
339
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 2, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9780226837659
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780226837659
Keywords for this book
Hector Berlioz; music theory; conductor; music critic; orchestra; opera; iconography; psychology; reception; fiction
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
