The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (review)

Bloom, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz. Cambridge: Cam-bridge UP, 2000. Pp. xxiv + 301. ISBN 0-521-59388-3 (hardback); 0-521-59638-6 (paper-back)

Timed to anticipate the bicentennial celebration of Hector Berlioz's birth in 1803, this volume is intended, according to editor Peter Bloom, to enrich "understanding of the life and work of that singularly fascinating composer, conductor, writer, traveler, friend, lover, cynic, and prophet" (3). Its eighteen essays by established Berlioz scholars are usefully framed on one side by a concise "Chronology" that relates biographical events to relevant moments in European history and, on the other side, by an annotated "Bibliography" that is ample but not overwhelming in scope. The essays themselves are well crafted for a general (academic) readership: unafraid to enter on occasion into musicological detail, their authors keep technical arguments brief and firmly anchored in wider contexts.

The book is divided into six sections of unequal length. Part I, a bit too broadly entitled "Perspectives," offers just two strategies for situating Berlioz within the cultural currents of nineteenth-century France. First, Jacques Barzun contributes a brief meditation on Berlioz's position between romantic faith (in religion or in art) and positivist materialism. Janet Johnson follows with a more extended consid-eration of the musical surroundings in which Berlioz pursued his early career, with emphasis on his determined resistance to the encompassing vogue for Rossini's operas. Part IV, "Execution," is similarly abbreviated, consisting of a single essay in which D. Kern Holoman discusses from a conductor's viewpoint the issues involved in performing Berlioz's music in the twenty-first century. Though practical and concrete, this chapter seems a trifle isolated; a companion study of the difficulties faced (or not) in performances of Berlioz's music during his lifetime would have been welcome. The book's concluding Part VI, "Renown," is also restricted to a solitary essay in which Lesley Wright draws on journal articles and memoirs to trace Berlioz reception from 1869, the year of his death, to 1903, the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Again, this otherwise interesting chapter suffers a little from the absence of a logical companion piece that would outline responses to Berlioz from 1903 to 2001, thus connecting his now distant centenary with his imminent bicentenary.

In between these short sections are more substantial and systematic chapter groupings. Part II, devoted to Berlioz's "Principal Compositions," opens with an essay on "Genre in Berlioz," in which Julian Rushton examines the tension between Berlioz's commitment to romantic originality and his competing desire for popularity among the often conservative audiences he encountered. Following Rushton's lead are five chapters organized by genre: Jeffrey Langford gives a descriptive analysis of the four innovative works that Berlioz called symphonies; Diana Bickley takes a similar approach to the various concert overtures that Berlioz composed over the course of his career; James Haar's chapter on "The operas and the dramatic legend" offers astute commentary on the gulf between Berlioz's inven-tiveness and the conventional operatic idiom of his time; Ralph P. Locke deftly locates Berlioz's religious works with respect to the shifting status of religious music in nineteenth-century Paris; and Annegret Fauser makes a compelling argument for the complex coherence of Berlioz's song cycles by setting them in the context of the romance that saturated musical life around him.

Part III turns to Berlioz's "Major Writings," beginning with Pierre Citron's essay on the serpentine intertwining of fact and fiction in Berlioz's autobiographical writing. Originally published as the introduction to Citron's 1991 edition of the Mémoires, it appears here in Peter Bloom's elegant translation (the volume's only reprint). Katherine Kolb then takes up Berlioz's experiments with narrative fiction, concisely analyzing gender polarizations in five short stories about artists from Les Soirées de l'orchestre. Turning next to Berlioz's brilliant, grueling work as a music journalist, Katharine...