Description
A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Hector Berlioz (18031869) 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 strangeand 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. Compri
