Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness
by David Cairns
Summary
The second half of David Cairns's life of Hector Berlioz picks the composer up in 1832, back in Paris with the Symphonie fantastique behind him and the whole war of his existence ahead, and follows him to his death in 1869: the greatness of the subtitle is the music, and the servitude is everything Berlioz had to do to afford it.
Cairns tells that double life with a biographer's patience and a partisan's blood pressure. Berlioz composed the Requiem, The Damnation of Faust, the enormous opera The Trojans, and a shelf of works Paris either ignored or mangled; to pay for the privilege he spent three decades as a working music critic, filing reviews he often loathed writing, and as one of the first great touring conductors, feted in Germany, Russia and London while his own city withheld the opera stage he needed most. The private life keeps pace: the obsessive courtship of the Irish actress Harriet Smithson and the long sad marriage it became, the second marriage, the deaths one by one of nearly everyone he loved, and at the end the great late love letter of a memoir.
Cairns, who translated the Memoirs and spent decades on this project, writes as a man who has lived inside his subject's head, and the book reads with novelistic momentum, no musicology degree required.
Around nine hundred pages in this volume alone.
Best for readers who want one of the great composer biographies in the language, and a portrait of genius conducted against constant, grinding resistance.
Historical Context & Significance
Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2000, the award's second year, and it remains the only music biography to win. It arrived as the completion of one of the great long projects in modern biography: Cairns published volume one, The Making of an Artist, a decade earlier, and the finished work appeared in good time for the composer's bicentenary in 2003.
Reviewers placed it immediately among the finest composer biographies ever written, and it did practical work as well as literary: Cairns had been arguing for decades, as critic and translator of the Memoirs, that Berlioz was a supreme composer rather than a gifted eccentric, and the biography is that argument in final form, landing just as recordings and performances, The Trojans above all, were completing the composer's rehabilitation.
David Cairns, longtime chief music critic of the Sunday Times, wrote it over some thirty years around the day job, which gives the subtitle its private echo.