Product Description

This, the first prize-winning volume of David Cairns's life of Berlioz, describes with unprecedented intimacy the composer's early life and career until the celebrated performance of Symphonie Fantastique in 1832. Cairns depicts a character of titanic energy and ambition in the process of becoming one of the most distinctive personalities and artists of the romantic era. In his struggles to escape his family's influence and plans, his move to Paris, and the exhausting setbacks of his early career, Berlioz emerges a figure at once recognisably modern and yet possessed by an unapproachable intensity of experience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #454994 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

About the Author
David Cairns was chief music critic of the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1992, having earlier been music critic and arts editor of the Spectator and a writer on the Evening Standard, the Financial Times and the New Statesman. From 1967 to 1972 he workedfor the London branch of Phonogram.

Customer Reviews

Not just a definitive biography but a great read.
This massive two volume biography of the greatest French composer of the Nineteenth Century has been praised and showered with awards. Not only is it now the definitive book on the composer, written by the Berlioz authority of our times but it is a totally absurbing account, not only of the music (which is still underestimated by many) but of the cultural history of the period too (the two volumes cover the years 1832-1836). The boy Berlioz witnessed the heady days of Napoleon's return from Elba, the young man was writing his Prix de Rome composition when the 1830 Revolution broke out and he lived to witness the reactionary stultification of France after the 1848 revolution.

David Cairns analyses the music in enough detail to guide us through Berlioz' still strikingly modern style without losing any less musicologically minded readers. He also offers a profound and penetrating analysis of this wonderfully human man who suffered throughout his life for his two great loves: music and women. Perhaps no other composer of the period was so interesting, so intelligently engaged in his times and so given to emotional excess.

Cairns paints a vivid picture in a surprizingly informal style which reads more like a Romantic novel than a biography. You really do have to read the next chapter to find out what happens. There is no loss of quality however, Cairns keeps us heads down as he passes scrupulously through each year putting the music into context - no composer's life was more expressed in music - and putting the man into the context of the times.

If Berlioz comes over as almost larger than life, it only goes to remind us that life is maybe bigger than many of us dare make it.

Don't be put off by the length, a big man deserves a big book and it is so very readable that you will regret coming to the end.