The Musical Voyager: Berlioz in Europe, and: Berlioz: Scenes from the Life and Work (review)

These two recent edited books on Berlioz and Berlioz's world present a wealth of stimulating new material. Berlioz: Scenes from the Life and Work is a splendid looking, meticulously edited and presented book, with a characteristically stylish introduction by Peter Bloom. The Musical Voyager: Berlioz in Europe is not so attractive: material is crammed tightly onto the page and the layout has inconsistencies. But both books make a substantial contribution to research on nineteenth-century music and Berlioz in particular.

In both cases the editors clearly have had problems in presenting unified, themed books rather than series of disparate articles. Bloom's book rounds up most of 'the usual suspects' among the top Berlioz scholars (none of whom disappoint); his book is divided into six pairs of 'complementary' articles. The first two pairings seem a little arbitrary and the justification for the links rather sophistical—and in the case of the pairing called 'Fact and Fiction', the links between Berlioz's tale Euphony and Berlioz and the mezzo-soprano rather meaningless—but this doesn't really matter: they are all excellent articles nonetheless. The Charlton/Ellis book has many articles by scholars not known for their Berlioz scholarship, but who from their position as outsiders bring exciting new perspectives to our knowledge of the composer. The first half of the book considers Berlioz the physical traveller in England and Russia, with a little side trip to Germany. The second half of the book looks at the 'Mental Traveller', and as with the case of the Bloom pairings, there is something a little artificial about this construct. On a basic level you could say any scholarly article is the work of mental travel. The description of the second part as showing 'the internal and aesthetic migrations of art, its displacements and "translations"' (p. xiv) sounds suspiciously like an attempt to force a connection between two halves. The second half is really a fairly loose collection of articles whose relationship to each other is that they are about Berlioz (although a significant number deal with aesthetic issues and Berlioz's relationship to literature, including three articles on Berlioz and Shakespeare). The lack of relationship between the two parts—and I do understand that one is forced by publishers to create the appearance of coherence—also doesn't actually bother me: the second half contains excellent articles. The third part of this book is 'Documentary Sources', collections of reviews that relate to Berlioz in London and Russia, and will be extremely useful.

In the Bloom volume many of the articles step beyond Berlioz himself to ask broader questions about writing about music, the nature of autobiography, and musical analysis. The first article in the collection, by Jacques Barzun, is not really about Berlioz at all. Instead it uses Berlioz as a springboard for asking questions about the appropriate vocabulary to use when writing about music, an issue that Barzun has raised provocatively many times over his distinguished career.

It is often a risky business reading composers' lives into their music, but the articles by Frank Heidlberger and Joël-Marie Fauquet in this collection do so in an extremely convincing way. Berlioz's flamboyant and public life cannot be put to one side; it demands to be interpreted in the music, although as Jean-Pierre Bartoli shows, harking back, in fact, to the view originally promoted by Schumann in his review of the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz's music also demonstrates a logic in absolute musical terms. Bartoli's analysis of the 'scène d'amour' from the 'Romeo et Juliette' symphony follows two pre-existent discursive structures: the literary structure of Shakespeare (balcony...