Search results for ""Author Hector Berlioz""

Following the composition of Harold en Italie for viola and orchestra in 1834, Berlioz began work on the opera Benvenuto Cellini, which subsequently failed on its first performances at the Paris Opera in 1838. Berlioz withdrew the opera for substantial revision, and from some of the discharged material he later fashioned this Reverie et Caprice (in versions both for violin and orchestra and violin and piano). Dedicated to Berlioz's violinist friend Alexandre-Joseph Artot, the price was quickly taken up by several celebrated violinists of the time, including David, Joachim and Wieniawski, and was played all over Europe.This new edition for violin and piano, by the musicologist and performer Neil Heyde, is based on the first edition of the score.

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"Berlioz the person-composer-writer is the sensitive child of his century and a most passionate voice of his time." —The Opera Quarterly"Berlioz could hardly have been better served than by the translator of this English edition . . . It is an invaluable and long-overdue addition to the Berlioz literature in English. Elisabeth Csicsery-Rónay has given us an A travers chants for the millennium." —Music and LettersHector Berlioz (1803-1869) was equally prominent as composer and music critic. A Travers Chants is the collection of writings he himself selected from his thirty-odd years of musical journalism. This new translation, phrased in lively, idiomatic English and annotated for the twentieth-century reader, is illustrated with lithographs and drawings from Berlioz's lifetime.

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During the performances of fashionable operas in an unidentified but "civilized" town in northern Europe, the musicians (with the exception of the conscientious bass drummer) tell tales, read stories, and exchange gossip to relieve the tedium of the bad music they are paid to perform. In this delightful and now classic narrative written by the brilliant composer and critic Hector Berlioz, we are privy to twenty-five highly entertaining evenings with a fascinating group of distracted performers. As we near the two-hundredth anniversary of Berlioz's birth, Jacques Barzun's pitch-perfect translation of Evenings with the Orchestra --with a new foreword by Berlioz scholar Peter Bloom--testifies to the enduring pleasure found in this most witty and amusing book. "[F]ull of knowledge, penetration, good sense, individual wit, stock humor, justifiable exasperation, understanding exaggeration, emotion and rhetoric of every kind." --Randall Jarrell, New York Times Book Review "To succeed in [writing these tales], as Berlioz most brilliantly does, requires a combination of qualities which is very rare, the many-faceted curiosity of the dramatist with the aggressively personal vision of the lyric poet."--W. H. Auden, The Griffin

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