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Life Under the Volcano
| Article
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10477 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
4,409 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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BERLIOZ STUDIES
Peter Bloom, ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992
298 pp., $59.95
Late in the afternoon of Thursday, July 29, 1830, an ambitious young music student was startled to hear the booming of cannon and the rattling of gunfire echoing across the Paris barricades. He threw down his pen and manuscript paper, thrust a pistol into his belt, and shouldered his way through the crowded Paris streets. The calvary barracks on the rue de Babylone were aflame. The citizenry were singing a battle hymn as they celebrated the fall of the monarchy. Striding through the smoke and rubble, the young man gladly joined in the chores. He recognized the tune. He had composed it.
His name was Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), and no one who saw him then or ever afterward could forget him. Rouget de Lisle, author of La Marseillaise, called him "a veritable volcano in perpetual eruption." Indeed, even in dandified Paris his appearance was striking his high collar reached up to his ferocious sideburns, his aquiline nose, and a mane of wild red hair erupted from his forehead like the wing of a startled eagle. The caricaturists were delighted, of course, and over the year they capitalized on Berlioz' fierce appearance and incendiary reputation. One cartoon in particular, Concert of gunfire, which appeared in 1846, depicted him waving a baton aloft over an orchestra comprised of double basses, horns and an enormous cannon.
These noisy and bombastic images of Hector Berlioz are hard to shake off. If it has kept his reputation alive, it has done him a far more serious disservice, obscuring so many other facets of his character and music. Berlioz Students, a new anthology of writings from distinguished Berlioz scholars around the world, joins several recent biographies as a corrective to all this. With nary a shot fired, it may be the calmest, most thoughtful assessment of the composer that has yet appeared.
Modern reconsiderations of Berlioz began with a revival initiated more than thirty years ago in Paris, England, and the United States spurred in large measure by Jacques Barzun's groundbreaking Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950) "No composer was so entirely... 'misknown' as Berlioz," Barzun wrote "[He was] one of the world's very few complete artists the epitome of an age [who] brings us face to face with every familiar contemporary, raises every intellectual question, and illustrates every practical
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