BERLIOZ

Artistic mastery fraught with tribulation propels this grand finale to the career of a paramount Romantic creator.

To prove his music's greatness, Berlioz had to become a great conductor; to pay his debts he had to undergo servitude as a journalist chained by his own verbal skill (epitomized by the Memoirs, whose "essential truthfulness" Cairns documents throughout). This "dog of a trade and a trade for dogs—always biting or licking" ate away time for composing the music so richly characterized one can almost hear the descriptions. Each major work (Harold in Italy, Romeo and Juliet, The Damnation of Faust, etc.) is seen to demand its own singular genre, while the religious pieces (Requiem, Te Deum) were haunted by a loss of faith (although "his imagination believed"). To conquer Paris was Berlioz's motivating hope, but Cairns details how a succession of governments so monopolized performing venues that every premiere was a battle, and his magnum opus, The Trojans, was never staged at the politics-riddled Op‚ra. Arduous tours, here bracingly re-created, afforded Berlioz heartwarming success in Hungary, London, Russia, and Germany (thanks to Liszt's selfless pioneering)—although friction arose when Berlioz doubted Wagner's new dogmas. (In regard to this last controversy Cairns stresses, "He believed in the future of music, not in the Music of the Future.") Although his later years were heavily clouded with grief—he outlived his wife Harriet Smithson, his son Louis, his second wife, both his sisters, and his still-unpersuaded father—Berlioz was sustained by valiant friendships and a happy rapprochement with a boyhood love. The sick exile who felt nowhere at home was a mere 65 when delivering his deathbed credo: "They are finally going to play my music." A model of biographical empathy, Berlioz transposes this "improbable novel" of a life from tragedy to vindication. (50 b&w

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