Berlioz Remembered

An intimate and revealing portrait of one of France's greatest composers.

The concentration of artistic talent in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century was one of the phenomena of European cultural history -- Hugo, Vigny, Balzac, Gautier, Ingres, Delacroix, Géricault, Heine, Cherubini, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Chopin, Liszt -- and at its center Berlioz, the archetypal Romantic, misunderstood, unrecognized, and ridiculed in his lifetime, and now generally accepted as the greatest French composer of the nineteenth century. His dynamic, often extravagant public image, combined with a sharp critical intelligence and a mischievous sense of humor, did not always endear him to his more conventional colleagues, but there was an engaging, naïve, sometimes almost timid private side to this insatiable seeker of musical truth that brought him many loyal but sometimes long-suffering friends.

His own memoirs, not always the most objective of accounts, have become a classic of musical literature, but they suffer from an inevitable self-regard. With Berlioz Remembered, Michael Rose presents the other side of the picture -- the effect Berlioz produced on others, whether friends or enemies, supporters or critics, or just plain observers -- and, in bringing together a series of impressions that can sometimes be as intemperate as Berlioz's own, Rose provides a revealing complement to them.