The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (review)

The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz. Edited by Peter Bloom. (Cambridge Companions to Music.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xxiv, 301 p. ISBN 0-521-59388-3 (cloth); 0-521-59638-5 (pbk.). $64.95 (cloth); $24.95 (pbk.).]

A welcome addition to the Cambridge Companions to Music series is the volume devoted to Hector Berlioz, the bicentenary of whose birth will be celebrated in 2003. Peter Bloom has edited an attractive group of eighteen essays by knowledgeable scholars.

In addition to the essays, the volume includes a chronology of Berlioz's life, an introduction, notes, an annotated bibliography by Jeffrey Langford of recent writings in English, and an index. It is well organized into six parts: "Perspectives," "Principal Compositions," "Major Writings," "Execution," "Critical Encounters," and "Renown" (pp. v-vi). Amid a wide range of issues, several concerns recur: To what extent are Berlioz's compositions and writings autobiographical in nature, given their connection to reality as artistic products of imaginative genius? How did Berlioz's outspoken views as a prominent music critic influence the course of his compositional career? How did the theatrical inclinations of the composer, a dramatist whose innovations blurred distinctions between genres, affect works that were not written for performance in a theater? There is agreement about Berlioz's extraordinarily expressive treatment of instruments and sonorities. The notes and text also furnish abundant evidence of consensus regarding the impressive scholarly achievements of the New Edition of the Complete Works (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1967- [known as the New Berlioz Edition]).

The book opens with an insightful piece by Jacques Barzun about the composer as cultivated, cosmopolitan thinker; it closes with Lesley Wright's consideration of his legacy in France. Consistently stimulating is the fifth section, comprising four essays that treat Berlioz's engagement with Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, respectively. Joël-Marie Fauquet describes Berlioz's frequent preoccupation with Gluck as critic, concert organizer, conductor, and director; linking Berlioz's restorations on behalf of Gluck to the societal idea of progress, Fauquet counters the notion that they represent a retreat into conservatism.

Hugh Macdonald ranges expertly over the evidence of criticism, programs conducted, and the difficult area of compositional impact to explore Berlioz's more ambiguous connection to Mozart. He describes the French composer's overriding concern to defend "the integrity of Mozart's work" (p. 222) in an era of Parisian stage adaptations and proposes effectively that Berlioz developed a deeper understanding of Mozart in later years.

David Cairns offers a significant corrective to the idea that the revelation of Beethoven was limited to a vista of formal freedom; to Berlioz the composer, it was "both formal and expressive, or rather an interfusing of the two" (p. 225) in which the dramatic expanded to embrace the symphonic. With characteristic grace, he also explains how essential was Berlioz's need as critic and conductor to share his enthusiastic knowledge of Beethoven's challenging inspiration with a wide public.

Bloom traces the multiple, complex connections between Berlioz and Wagner to examine how and why Berlioz can be regarded as a model for his younger colleague. He contends persuasively that although the German composer "knew well" (p. 246) much of Berlioz's music through performances in Paris and published scores, he "did not know him" (p. 249), contrary to his claims.

Berlioz came to Paris in 1821, when Gioachino Rossini's works had recently begun to be performed successfully at the Théâtre Italien, and Janet Johnson conveys very well the musical environment in the capital from that perspective. To her statement that the guerre rossinienne of the 1820s "differed from earlier musical quarrels in that it was not only a contest between national styles" (p. 28), I would note that the recurrent operatic controversies in France during the eighteenth century were not merely disputes between differing national styles or genres; they also generated larger aesthetic disagreements between ancients and moderns that resurfaced yet again in varied ways with the emergence of romanticism.

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