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Berlioz and His World

Online ISBN:
9780226837659
Print ISBN:
9780226837673
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Berlioz and His World

Francesca Brittan (ed.),
Francesca Brittan
(ed.)

Associate Professor

Case Western Reserve University
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Sarah Hibberd (ed.)
Sarah Hibberd
(ed.)

Stanley Hugh Badock Chair of Music

University of Bristol
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
5 August 2024
Online ISBN:
9780226837659
Print ISBN:
9780226837673
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a challenging figure to place and explain. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our solar system,” the likes of which would never be seen again. For Schumann, he was brilliant but radical, a composer whose music was “not to be listened to with the ear alone.” In these, as in later accounts, Berlioz was simply too strange—along with too noisy, too German, too literary, too experimental with genre and form, and too difficult to analyze. He was, in many ways, a composer without a world. Berlioz and His World takes a deep dive into the composer’s complex legacy, tracing lines between his musical and literary output and the scientific, sociological, technological, and political influences that shaped him. Comprising nine essays covering key facets of Berlioz’s contribution, and six short object lessons meant as conversation-starters, the book reveals Berlioz as a richly intersectional figure. His very difficulty, including his tendency to straddle the worlds of composer, conductor, and critic, is revealed as a strength, inviting new lines of cross-disciplinary enquiry and a fresh look at his European and American reception.

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