The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (review)

In introducing the Berlioz entry in the Cambridge Companions to Music series, Peter Bloom explains that its purpose is "to point Kenner, Liebhaber, and self-improving readers with well-stored minds to the satisfactions and singularities of the work of a complex and enduringly inventive artist" (p. 8). Bloom has enlisted some of the leading writers on Berlioz and his era, who address the full range of Berlioz's work, including his prose as well as his music. The result is sure to gratify Kenner, Liebhaber, and self-improving readers alike.

The volume is divided into six sections: "Perspectives," "Principal Compositions," "Major Writings," "Execution," "Critical Encounters," and "Renown." The first consists of a pair of essays—"Berlioz as Man and Thinker" by Jacques Barzun (possessor of the well-stored mind par excellence) and "The Musical Environment in France" by Janet Johnson. The musical environment discussed by Johnson is largely operatic, so the second of these chapters may be of special interest to readers of The Opera Quarterly, particularly in the way she deals with Berlioz's conflicted feelings about the music of Rossini.

Julian Rushton's "Genre in Berlioz" heads the second group of essays, and his overview of Berlioz's idiosyncratic approach to genre provides a helpful starting point for the five subsequent essays, which examine the principal works according to genre. As is often the case in "companions," space limitations preclude much sustained discussion. James Haar, for example, must cover La damnation de Faust, Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens, and Béatrice et Bénedict in fifteen pages. Wisely, he deals with the context in which these works were produced and with their reception, touching on some of Berlioz's compositional procedures but refraining from close analysis. The other contributors to this section are Jeffrey Langford (the symphonies), Diana Bickley (the concert overtures), Ralph P. Locke (the religious works), and Annegret Fauser (the songs).

The third major division takes up Berlioz's prose, headed by Pierre Citron's entertaining and insightful discussion of Berlioz's Mémoires (evidently the only previously published essay in the volume). Katherine Kolb's brief analysis of five stories from Les soirées de l'orchestre will undoubtedly send many readers in search of the entire work, and Katharine Ellis's examination of Berlioz's essays on Beethoven's symphonies (she concentrates on his description of the Allegretto of the Seventh Symphony) brings appreciation not only for Berlioz's critical acumen but for his prose style as well. In "The Grand Traité d'instrumentation," Joël-Marie Fauquet looks at Berlioz's famous treatise on orchestration from several vantage points, first comparing the finished Traité (1843) to the series of articles ("De l'instrumentation") Berlioz had published in the Revue et Gazette Musicale the previous year and briefly suggesting the ways in which Berlioz "had to redesign the book from the foundations up, filling in all of the small, technical details" (the composer's own description, quoted on p. 168). Fauquet also compares this treatise to those Berlioz would have read, finding that Berlioz certainly broke new ground but did not break with the past to the extent some may think. Fauquet's essay, which concludes with the judgment that the Traité is, "above all, a consummate treatise on aesthetics" (p. 170), is followed by "Performing Berlioz," in which D. Kern Holoman examines the embodiment of Berlioz's theories in his scores. In this chapter (which constitutes the "Execution" section), Holoman takes up the challenges of performing Berlioz's music, which he characterizes as the difficulties of "finding the hardware and personnel on the one hand, and the software on the other" (p. 176). His catalogue of unusual orchestral "hardware" required by Berlioz—as well as his descriptions of where to locate these instruments or some more or less satisfactory alternatives—makes fascinating reading. So does his discussion of the divergences among...