Berlioz and His World.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brittan, Francesca.

Contributor:

Hibberd, Sarah.

Series:

The Bard Music Festival Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Berlioz, Hector, 1803-1869--Criticism and interpretation.

Berlioz, Hector.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (376 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Summary:

A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. 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 musical solar system,” the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange—and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier 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, his tendency to straddle the worlds of composer, conductor, and critic, is revealed as a strength, inviting new lines of cross-disciplinary inquiry and a fresh look at his European and American reception.

Contents:

Introduction: Berlioz and the pantheon / Francesca Brittan, Sarah Hibberd

Essays I: The language of prophecy in Les Troyens / Sarah Hibbard ; "Ossianic sounds": Berlioz on memory / Carmel Raz ; Berlioz contra Rousseau: Nature, culture, and la musique descriptive / Alexander Kieffer

Object lessons I: Berlioz's Virgil / Ellen Lockhart

Inevitable antagonists: Berlioz and Donizetti / Roger Parker ; Hearing the Hostias, rehearing the Requiem / Jennifer Walker

Essays II: Orchestral futurisms: Berlioz and science fiction / Francesca Brittan ; Passing the baton: Conducting masculinity in La damnation de Faust / Inge Van Rij ; On Berlioz's subterranean operations: Toward a nineteenth-century media logic / Shaena B. Weitz

Object lessons II: Euphonian sound and fury, signifying something / Benjamin Walton ; Berlioz: Conductor and one-man band / Jacek Blaszkiewicz ; "Je crois en vous" / Nathan Dougherty

Essays III: American episodes in the life of the artist / Jonathan Kregor ; A comet in the musical sky: Ferdinand Hiller on Hector Berlioz / Ralph P. Locke, Jürgen Thym ; Intimate beauty and sublime grandeur: Sound and space in the music of Berlioz / Leon Botstein.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226837659

0226837653

OCLC:

1442031293