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.

Self-revelations of tormented great composer; musical life in Paris, Wagner and other contemporaries, musical opinions, much more. 11 plates.

Experiencing Berlioz: A Listener’s Companion is an in-depth entrée into the sound world of Hector Berlioz, recognized today as one of the most profoundly original and engaging composers in 19th-century Europe. Melinda O’Neal offers the non-specialist a pathway into the underlying allure of Berlioz's music. His views on rehearsing and conducting, bumpy career ride and failures, the journey of a work through revisions and editions, and historical performance practices provide a backdrop to discussions of his most significant works. As O’Neal addresses the motivation and conception, sonic atmosphere, and compositional strategies of key works, she provides a new multifaceted experience not only to music historians and performers but also to any amateur music lover who has ever been entranced by Berlioz’s undeniable musical veracity. As the listener interacts with Berlioz's music, the ear's curiosity and imagination will take flight.

Jones, Barry Owen (1932– ). Australian politician, writer and lawyer, born in Geelong. Educated at Melbourne High School and Melbourne University, he was a public servant, high school teacher, television and radio performer, university lecturer and lawyer before serving as a Labor MP in the Victorian Parliament 1972–77 and the Australian House of Representatives 1977–98. He took a leading role in reviving the Australian film industry and abolishing the death penalty in Australia, and was the first politician to raise public awareness of global warming, the ‘post‑industrial’ society, the IT revolution, biotechnology, the rise of ‘the Third Age’ and the need to preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. In the *Hawke Government, he was Minister for Science 1983–90, Prices and Consumer Affairs 1987, Small Business 1987–90 and Customs 1988–90. He became a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO, Paris 1991–95 and National President of the Australian Labor Party 1992–2000, 2005–06. He was Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Convention 1998. His books include Decades of Decision 1860– (1965), Joseph II (1968) and Age of Apocalypse (1975), and he edited The Penalty Is Death (1968, revised and expanded 2022). Sleepers, Wake! Technology and the Future of Work was published by Oxford University Press in 1982, became a bestseller and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and braille. The fourth edition was published in 1995. Knowledge Courage Leadership: Insights & Reflections, a collection of speeches and essays, appeared in 2016. He received a DSc in 1988 for his services to science and a DLitt in 1993 for his work on information theory. Elected FTSE (1992), FAHA (1993), FAA (1996) and FASSA (2003), he is the only person to have become a Fellow of four of Australia’s five learned Academies. Awarded an AO in 1993, named as one of Australia’s 100 ‘living national treasures’ in 1997, he was elected a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1999. His autobiography, A Thinking Reed, was published in 2006 and The Shock of Recognition, about music and literature, in 2016. In 2014 he received an AC for services ‘as a leading intellectual in Australian public life’. What Is to Be Done was published by Scribe in 2020.

In this abridgment of his monumental study, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, Jacques Barzun recounts the events and extraordinary achievements of the great composer's life against the background of the romantic era. As the author eloquently demonstrates, Berloiz was an archetype whose destiny was the story of an age, the incarnation of an artistic style and a historical spirit. "In order to understand the nineteenth century, it is essential to understand Berlioz," notes W. H. Auden, "and in order to understand Berlioz, it is essential to read Professor Barzun."

Victor Lederer surveys the music of Hector Berlioz, one of the most pioneering orchestrators in history, and introduces the general music lover to both his masterpieces such as Les Troyens and lesser known gems. A bold innovator in the 19th century, Berlioz was a musical dramatist with an output that is less familiar than it should be and often misunderstood. His most famous and popular pieces are the thrilling programmatic symphonies, the Symphonie fantastique and Harold en Italie. The “dramatic symphonies” Roméo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust are both driven by conflict and excitement, which contrast his piercing, long-limbed melodies and startling harmonic shifts. Berlioz’s strongly profiled musical style possesses high rhythmic energy, and manic outbursts that are instantly identifiable as his, and he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and effective orchestrators in history. The book is accompanied by online audio tracks to select Berlioz works from the Naxos library.

Few aspects of Berlioz's style are more idiosyncratic than his handling of musical form. This book, the first devoted solely to the topic, explores how his formal strategies are related to the poetic and dramatic sentiments that were his very reason for being. Rodgers draws upon Berlioz's ideas about musical representation and on the ideas that would have influenced him, arguing that the relationship between musical and extra-musical narrative in Berlioz's music is best construed as metaphorical rather than literal - 'intimate' but 'indirect' in Berlioz's words. Focusing on a type of varied-repetitive form that Berlioz used to evoke poetic ideas such as mania, obsession, and meditation, the book shows how, far from disregarding form when pushing the limits of musical evocation, Berlioz harnessed its powers to convey these ideas even more vividly.

No nineteenth-century composer had more diverse ties to his contemporary world than Franz Liszt (1811-1886). At various points in his life he made his home in Vienna, Paris, Weimar, Rome, and Budapest. In his roles as keyboard virtuoso, conductor, master teacher, and abbé, he reinvented the concert experience, advanced a progressive agenda for symphonic and dramatic music, rethought the possibilities of church music and the oratorio, and transmitted the foundations of modern pianism. The essays brought together in Franz Liszt and His World advance our understanding of the composer with fresh perspectives and an emphasis on historical contexts. Rainer Kleinertz examines Wagner's enthusiasm for Liszt's symphonic poem Orpheus; Christopher Gibbs discusses Liszt's pathbreaking Viennese concerts of 1838; Dana Gooley assesses Liszt against the backdrop of antivirtuosity polemics; Ryan Minor investigates two cantatas written in honor of Beethoven; Anna Celenza offers new insights about Liszt's experience of Italy; Susan Youens shows how Liszt's songs engage with the modernity of Heinrich Heine's poems; James Deaville looks at how publishers sustained Liszt's popularity; and Leon Botstein explores Liszt's role in the transformation of nineteenth-century preoccupations regarding religion, the nation, and art. Franz Liszt and His World also includes key biographical and critical documents from Liszt's lifetime, which open new windows on how Liszt was viewed by his contemporaries and how he wished to be viewed by posterity. Introductions to and commentaries on these documents are provided by Peter Bloom, José Bowen, James Deaville, Allan Keiler, Rainer Kleinertz, Ralph Locke, Rena Charnin Mueller, and Benjamin Walton.

Berlioz was one of the towering figures of Romanticism: not only was he a great and revolutionary composer, but also the finest composer of his day and an outstanding critic and writer. Yet throughout his life he struggled for money and his music was persistently reviled in his native France. With exceptional insight and sympathy, David Cairns draws together the major strands of Berlioz's life: his tempestuous marriage to the actress Harriet Smithson; the genesis of his famous works, including the Requiem, Romeo and Juliet and his crowning masterpiece The Trojans; his friendships with Mendelssohn, Liszt, Princess Wittgenstein and Wagner; and, finally, his last years haunted once again by personal tragedy. Here, as never before, is Berlioz the artist - and the man.