Berlioz

Hector Berlioz, in his life and music, was everything that the drab conformists of the Establishment are not. This, perhaps, may explain why the Berlioz vogue has run concurrently with the Liberal hold on manners and morals in these United States. This is not paradox but compensation. The man who burst into the drawing room of French music to paint on its brocaded walls in shimmering color and somber shadow was a blatant individualist. He loved passionately and idiotically, dredged pity and terror from his psyche and from the acres of instruments he roamed, allowed free rein to his genius and his personal devils.

Berlioz, then, is an antidote to the drear limits of these rutted times. The occasional over-zealousness of his writing, the foot-faults of taste, and his sometime belief that artistic expression is of kind of tantrum become virtues in the context of that nitpicking which passes for contemporary music. Even the flawed passages of the Fantastic Symphony—and there are many such, for Berlioz was not a conscientious artist—evoke a fierce joy in those grown bored with the sterilities of an Aaron Copland or a Roy Harris. Berlioz wrote music which was at once visceral and highly intellectual, and it reaches out to us today.

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Ralph de Toledano

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Hector Berlioz, in his life and music, was everything that the drab conformists of the Establishment are not. This, perhaps, may explain why the Berlioz vogue has run concurrently with the Liberal hold on manners and morals in these United States. This is not paradox but compensation. The man who burst into the drawing room of French music to paint on its brocaded walls in shimmering color and somber shadow was a blatant individualist. He loved passionately and idiotically, dredged pity and terror from his psyche and from the acres of instruments he roamed, allowed free rein to his genius and his personal devils.

Berlioz, then, is an antidote to the drear limits of these rutted times. The occasional over-zealousness of his writing, the foot-faults of taste, and his sometime belief that artistic expression is of kind of tantrum become virtues in the context of that nitpicking which passes for contemporary music. Even the flawed passages of the Fantastic Symphony—and there are many such, for Berlioz was not a conscientious artist—evoke a fierce joy in those grown bored with the sterilities of an Aaron Copland or a Roy Harris. Berlioz wrote music which was at once visceral and highly intellectual, and it reaches out to us today.