Berlioz, vol. 2, Servitude and Greatness, 1832-1869 (review)

Berlioz. Vol. 2, Servitude and Greatness, 1832-1869. By David Cairns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. [xi, 895 p. ISBN 0-520-22200-8. $40.]

Hector Berlioz was misunderstood during his lifetime, but his career has been attentively examined by recent biographers. To the small circle of distinguished modern biographies in English, including those by Jacques Barzun, Hugh Macdonald, D. Kern Holoman, and Peter Bloom, must be added the newly completed, definitive work in two volumes by David Cairns. The second volume, continuing the account of the composer's early years begun in volume 1, The Making of an Artist, 1803-1832 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; London: André Deutsch, 1989), encompasses the exciting period during which Berlioz became prominent as a composer, music critic, conductor, and concert organizer. His multiple activities become the central focus in Cairns's abundantly knowledgeable, richly detailed, and consistently engrossing narrative.

Cairns meaningfully explores the inextricable connections, as well as the disparities, between Berlioz's life and his art. Certain chapters pertain primarily to the circumstances surrounding the creation of major works, including the Requiem, Benvenuto Cellini, Roméo et Juliette, La damnation de Faust, L'enfance du Christ, and Les Troyens. Five chapters ("Harriet," "Marie," "Liszt," "Wagner," "Louis") concentrate on important individuals: Harriet Smithson, the radiant, ideal Juliet who finally agreed to marry him; Marie Recio, the attractive companion and singer who ultimately became his second wife; Franz Liszt, with whom Berlioz enjoyed a warmly supportive friendship for many years; Richard Wagner, the contemporary colleague with whom conflict would become inevitable; and Louis Berlioz, the son to whom he grew close by the mid-1860s. Berlioz recognized contradictions between his interior existence and the products of his genius, noting in a letter to his sister Adéle Suat in 1857, "I am still ill and filled with an unconquerable sadness. I forget myself only in working. . . . The musician 'I' is very different from the 'I' that you know; the one would love to be able to rid himself of the other" (p. 623). His sympathetic biographer provides vivid testimony throughout the book that "the life, with its miseries as well as its splendours, was necessary to the art" because the suffering of this "nature in love with unattainable beauty" (p. 779) left its mark on many of his characteristic passages.

As translator and editor of The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), Cairns is uniquely positioned to discern parallels and discrepancies between events recalled in that autobiography and those experienced according to contemporary correspondence. He skillfully interweaves insightful interpretations of Berlioz's letters with other primary documents. Another significant asset is the author's astutely corrective musical commentary. For example, he disputes the often repeated dichotomy between an early, intense, "romantic" and a later, serene, "classical" Berlioz, pointing out that Les Troyens represents both a deliberate summation and a daring expansion into "new regions" (p. 598). Besides, Cairns convincingly posits a more consequential stylistic "alternating pattern" (pp. 116, 139, 431) of spacious architectural works whose breadth suits resonant buildings (e.g., the Requiem) and those with strikingly unpredictable rhythms whose pace changes swiftly (e.g., Benvenuto Cellini). The dramatist joined stylistic change to his aim of achieving "passionate expression," which he partly defined as conveying the inmost essence of the subject, "even when that subject is the opposite of passion, and tender feelings are being expressed" (quoted, p. 552).

Cairns delineates the unifying threads of Berlioz's manifold activities, including his consistent literary and musical attachments to Virgil and William Shakespeare, Christoph Willibald Gluck and Ludwig van Beethoven. He clarifies how those passions inspired compositions, critical essays, and numerous concerts and productions conducted or supervised. When appropriate, the author ingeniously ties these abiding concerns to Berlioz's personal crises. In a chapter entitled "Lost Illusions," for example, he reveals how Harriet's exclusion from a theatrical career in France, growing isolation, and increasing suspicions led by 1840 to a...