Editing Hector Berlioz (section)

==Reputation and Berlioz scholarship==

===Writers===
[[File:Jerome Paturot a la recherche d'une position sociale 1846 (115874799) (cropped).jpg|thumb|This caricature of the quintessential romantic musician by [[Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville|J. J. Grandville]] was based on Berlioz.  Wood engraving from ''Jérôme Paturot à la recherche d'une position sociale'' (1846).<ref name="Lloyd (1968)">Lloyd, Norman. 1968. ''The Golden Encyclopedia on Music. Golden Press''. New York. 720 pp. (page 66)</ref>     
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The first biography of Berlioz, by [[Eugène de Mirecourt]], was published during the composer's lifetime. Holoman lists six other French biographies of the composer published in the four decades after his death.<ref>Holoman (1989), p. 633</ref> Of those who wrote for and against Berlioz's music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, among the most outspoken were musical amateurs such as the lawyer and diarist [[George Templeton Strong]], who called the composer's music variously "flatulent", "rubbish", and "the work of a tipsy chimpanzee",<ref>Barzun, p. 12</ref> and, in the pro-Berlioz camp, the poet and journalist [[Walter J. Turner]], who wrote what Cairns calls "exaggerated eulogies".<ref name=c1963>Cairns (1963), p. 548</ref>{{refn|A commentator in ''[[The Musical Times]]'' wrote in 1929 that if Berlioz's partisans were to be credited "his music contains a magic that is absent from Bach, a strength and purity that were denied to Wagner, and a subtlety to which Mozart could in no sense attain."<ref>Elliott, p. 602</ref>|group= n}} Like Strong, Turner was, in the words of the music critic Charles Reid, "unhampered by any excess of technical knowledge".<ref>Reid, p. 189</ref>

Serious studies of Berlioz in the 20th century began with [[Adolphe Boschot]]'s ''L'Histoire d'un romantique'' (three volumes, 1906–1913). His successors were Tom S. Wotton, author of a 1935 biography, and [[Julien Tiersot]], who wrote numerous scholarly articles on Berlioz and began the collection and editing of the composer's letters, a process eventually completed in 2016, eighty years after Tiersot's death.<ref name=h75>Holoman (1975), pp. 57–58</ref> In the early 1950s the best-known Berlioz scholar was [[Jacques Barzun]], a protégé of Wotton, and, like him, strongly hostile to many of Boschot's conclusions, which they saw as unfairly critical of the composer.<ref name=h75/> Barzun's study was published in 1950. He was accused at the time by the musicologist [[Winton Dean]] of being excessively partisan, and refusing to admit failings and unevenness in Berlioz's music;<ref>Dean, pp. 122–123 and 128–129</ref> more recently he has been credited by the musicologist [[Nicholas Temperley]] with playing a major part in improving the climate of musical opinion towards Berlioz.<ref>Holoman (1975), p. 59</ref>

Since Barzun, the leading Berlioz scholars have included [[David Cairns (writer)|David Cairns]], [[D. Kern Holoman]], [[Hugh Macdonald (musicologist)|Hugh Macdonald]] and Julian Rushton. Cairns translated and edited Berlioz's ''Mémoires'' in 1969, and published a two-volume, 1500-page study of the composer (1989 and 1999), described in ''[[Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians|Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians]]'' as "one of the masterpieces of modern biography".<ref>[[Stanley Sadie|Sadie, Stanley]]. [http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000004558 "Cairns, David"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181112223502/http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000004558 |date=12 November 2018 }}, ''Grove Music Online'', Oxford University Press, 2001. Retrieved 19 October 2018. {{subscription}}</ref> Holoman was responsible for the publication in 1987 of the first thematic catalogue of Berlioz's works; two years later he published a single-volume biography of the composer.<ref>Morgan, Paula. [http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000046974 "Holoman, D(allas) Kern" ] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181112223626/http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000046974 |date=12 November 2018 }}, ''Grove Music Online'', Oxford University Press, 2001. Retrieved 19 October 2018. {{subscription}}</ref> Macdonald was appointed in 1967 as the inaugural general editor of the New Berlioz Edition published by [[Bärenreiter]]; 26 volumes were issued between 1967 and 2006 under his editorship.<ref name=mac/><ref>[https://www.baerenreiter.com/en/publishing-house/baerenreiter-encyclopedia/new-berlioz-edition-nbe/ "New Berlioz Edition"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181028112256/https://www.baerenreiter.com/en/publishing-house/baerenreiter-encyclopedia/new-berlioz-edition-nbe/ |date=28 October 2018 }}, Bärenreiter-Verlag. Retrieved 28 October 2018</ref> He is also one of the editors of Berlioz's ''Correspondance générale'', and author of a 1978 study of Berlioz's orchestral music, and of the ''Grove'' article on the composer.<ref name=mac>Holoman (2001), p. 346; and Scott, David. [http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000017313 "Macdonald, Hugh J(ohn)"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181112223557/http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000017313 |date=12 November 2018 }}, ''Grove Music Online'', Oxford University Press, 2001. Retrieved 19 October 2018. {{subscription}}</ref> Rushton has published two volumes of analyses of Berlioz's music (1983 and 2001). The critic Rosemary Wilson said of his work, "He has done more than any other writer to explain the uniqueness of Berlioz's musical style without losing a sense of wonder in its originality of musical expression."<ref>Williamson, Rosemary. [http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000047143 "Rushton, Julian"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181011133718/http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000047143 |date=11 October 2018 }}, ''Grove Music Online'', Oxford University Press, 2001. Retrieved 19 October 2018. {{subscription}}</ref>

===Changing reputation===
{{Quote box |quoted=true |bgcolor=#DADDFF|salign=right| quote= No other composer [is] so controversial as Hector Berlioz. Feelings about the merits of his music are seldom lukewarm; it has always tended to excite either uncritical admiration or unfair disparagement.| source = ''The Record Guide'', 1955.<ref name=sw119>Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor, p. 119</ref>|align=right|width=250px}}

Because few of Berlioz's works were often performed in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, widely accepted views of his music were based on hearsay rather than on the music itself.<ref name=c1963/><ref name=b11>Barzun, pp. 11–13</ref> Orthodox opinion emphasised supposed technical defects in the music and ascribed to the composer characteristics that he did not possess.<ref name=c1963/> [[Claude Debussy|Debussy]] called him "a monster&nbsp;... not a musician at all. He creates the illusion of music by means borrowed from literature and painting".<ref>Sorrell, p. 63</ref> In 1904, in the second edition of ''Grove'', [[William Henry Hadow|Henry Hadow]] made this judgment:

{{quote|The remarkable inequality of his composition may be explained, in any rate in part, as the work of a vivid imagination striving to explain itself in a tongue which he never perfectly understood.<ref>Hadow, p. 310</ref>}}

By the 1950s the critical climate was changing, although in 1954 the fifth edition of ''Grove'' carried this verdict from [[Léon Vallas]]:

{{quote|Berlioz, in truth, never did contrive to express what he aimed at in the impeccable manner he desired. His boundless artistic ambition was nourished by no more than a melodic gift of no great amplitude, clumsy harmonic procedures and a pen without pliancy.<ref>Vallas, p. 663</ref>}}

Cairns dismisses the article as "an astonishing anthology of all the nonsense that has ever been talked about [Berlioz]", but adds that by the 1960s it seemed a quaint survival from a vanished age.<ref name=c1963/> By 1963 Cairns, viewing Berlioz's greatness as firmly established, felt able to advise anyone writing on the subject, "Do not keep harping on the 'strangeness' of Berlioz's music; you will no longer carry the reader with you. And do not use phrases like 'genius without talent', 'a certain strain of amateurishness', 'curiously uneven': they have had their day."<ref name=c1963/>

One important reason for the steep rise in Berlioz's reputation and popularity is the introduction of the [[Long playing record|LP]] record after the Second World War. In 1950 Barzun made the point that although Berlioz was praised by his artistic peers, including Schumann, Wagner, [[César Franck]] and [[Modest Mussorgsky]], the public had heard little of his music until recordings became widely available. Barzun maintained that many myths had grown up about the supposed quirkiness or ineptitude of the music – myths that were dispelled once the works were finally made available for all to hear.<ref name=b11/> [[Neville Cardus]] made a similar point in 1955.<ref>Cardus, Neville. "A Note on Berlioz", ''The Manchester Guardian'', 31 October 1955, p. 5</ref> As more and more Berlioz works became widely available on record, professional musicians and critics, and the musical public, were for the first time able to judge for themselves.<ref name=b11/>

A milestone in the reappraisal of Berlioz's reputation came in 1957, when for the first time a professional opera company staged the original version of ''The Trojans'' in a single evening. It was at the [[Royal Opera House|Royal Opera House, Covent Garden]]; the work was sung in English with some minor cuts, but its importance was internationally recognised, and led to the world premiere staging of the work uncut and in French, at Covent Garden in 1969, marking the centenary of the composer's death.<ref name=h678>Hudson, p. 678</ref>{{refn|A production under [[Thomas Beecham|Sir Thomas Beecham]] had been planned for the 1940 Covent Garden season but had to be abandoned because of the outbreak of war.<ref>Jefferson, p. 190</ref> The 1957 production was conducted by [[Rafael Kubelík]];<ref>Haltrecht, p. 225</ref> the 1969 production was conducted by [[Colin Davis]].<ref name=h678/> The opera has subsequently entered the international repertoire. The international database Operabase records productions of ''Les Troyens'' in Dresden, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Paris, St Petersburg and Vienna between 2017 and 2020.<ref>[http://operabase.com/oplist.cgi?id=none&lang=en&is=&by=Berlioz&loc=&stype=abs&sd=1&sm=1&sy=2017&etype=abs&ed=31&em=12&ey=2020 "Berlioz"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181019082655/http://operabase.com/oplist.cgi?id=none&lang=en&is=&by=Berlioz&loc=&stype=abs&sd=1&sm=1&sy=2017&etype=abs&ed=31&em=12&ey=2020 |date=19 October 2018 }}, Operabase. Retrieved 4 October 2018</ref>|group= n}}

In recent decades Berlioz has been widely regarded as a great composer, prone to lapses like any other. In 1999 the composer and critic [[Bayan Northcott]] wrote that the work of Cairns, Rushton, [[Colin Davis|Sir Colin Davis]] and others retained "the embattled conviction of a cause". Nevertheless, Northcott was writing about Davis's "Berlioz Odyssey" of seventeen concerts of Berlioz's music, featuring all the major works, a prospect unimaginable in earlier decades of the century.<ref name=bn/><ref>Allison, John. "Davis and the LSO embark on their year-long journey through Berlioz", ''The Times'', 7 December 1999, p. 41</ref> Northcott concluded, "Berlioz still seems so immediate, so controversial, so ever-new".<ref name=bn>[[Bayan Northcott|Northcott, Bayan]]. [https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical-still-so-controversial-still-so-new-1128757.html "Still so controversial, still so new"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181011140400/https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical-still-so-controversial-still-so-new-1128757.html |date=11 October 2018 }}, ''[[The Independent]]'', 26 November 1999. Retrieved 19 October 2018.</ref>