David Cairns (1) (1926–)

As he lay on his deathbed in March 1869, the last words the French composer Hector Berlioz were heard to speak were, “Enfin on va jouer ma musique” – “They are finally going to play my music.” Though David Cairns spends the epilogue of the second volume of his superb biography of Berlioz analyzing this statement, its meaning is clear enough from his description of Berlioz’s public career in France. For as Cairns details, one of the tragedies of Berlioz’s life is that his music was acclaimed practically everywhere but in Paris, where he wore himself down in his lifelong struggle to win acceptance and fortune for his work.

This struggle becomes even more incomprehensible when compared to the widespread acclaim Berlioz received for his music throughout Europe. Though not universal, the adulation he received throughout Europe proved an essential prop to his career, providing him with an income he desperately needed for his financial obligations. These had expanded in 1832 with his marriage to the English actress Harriet Smithson. Once the toast of the Parisian theater, her career was in decline by the time she met Berlioz in 1831. When the book begins, the two are settling down into married life faced with the problem of how to pay the money the Berliozes owed to Smithson’s creditors. This proved challenging; though Berlioz enjoyed a reputation as a rising composer, he faced a perennial difficulty in staging concerts, the proceeds of which were the main source of income for artists at that time,

Faced with such difficulties, Berlioz turned instead to another field: journalism. This proved profitable enough for the Berliozes, despite taking Hector away from his composing. As a music critic himself Cairns is ideally suited to evaluate this aspect of Berlioz’s career, and he gives high marks to the high quality of his subject’s writing. This may have earned him enemies, but with a young son and his wife’s acting career ending the income was one that Berrlioz could ill afford to decline.

Nevertheless, Berlioz continued composing. These were the years of his Requiem and of his opera Benvenuto Cellini. Because of them, by the end of the 1830s Berlioz was at the height of his popularity in Paris. Yet financial success still eluded him, thanks to the poor quality of the performers, the limited availability of venues and the restrictions imposed by the French government. The situation led him by the early 1840s to look outside of France for performance opportunities. These he soon found in Germany, where he discovered the skilled orchestras and rapturous audiences missing at home. This established a pattern that would define the next quarter-century of his life, as he enjoyed acclaim everywhere except the one place that mattered the most to him.

Part of the problem for Berlioz was the changing tastes of his Parisian audiences. By the 1840s the fad for Romantic music had run its course in the French capital, which affected negatively the reception of his oratorio The Damnation of Faust, his major work during that decade. Performing outside of France remained profitable, but the task of traveling and organizing performances took time away from composition. It wasn’t until 1856 that Berlioz began work on what Cairns regards as his magnum opus, an epic opera based on the Aeneid called The Trojans. Though completed two years later, the sheer scale of it – five acts that took five hours to perform – made it difficult to stage. Though Berlioz invested five years in the effort, it was only produced in a truncated version in 1863. The dispiriting result, coupled with Berlioz’s increasingly poor health, brought an end to his career as a composer, just six years before his death.

Though shunned as a composer by many of his countrymen during his lifetime, in the decades since his death Berlioz has come to be regarded by them as one of the greatest artists in their nation’s long history, thus fulfilling his deathbed prediction. It is in Cairns’s biography, however, that he had fully received his due, In it he gives an account of Berlioz’s life that is sympathetic while remaining critical in it judgments. He supplements his text with long extracts from Berlioz’s correspondence, giving his reader’s a sense of his own voice as a writer, It makes for a masterpiece of scholarship that enriches not just our understanding of the life of one of the great classical composers but of his music and the broader culture in which it was produced. No reader interested in Berlioz or in the music of his era can afford to ignore it.… (mais)

In the spring of 1828, Beethoven’s Third Symphony was performed in Paris for the first time. For those in attendance the music was a revelation, and for none more so than for a 24-year-old student at the Paris Conservatoire named Hector Berlioz. It was here, as David Cairns explains, that the man regarded by many as the father of modern orchestration first appreciated the value of symphonic music as a dramatic form. It was an important step in his development as a composer, the chronicling of which is the focus of Cairns’s hefty volume covering the first three decades of Berlioz’s life. Through it he traces Berlioz’s musical education and his emergence as a composer of renown, one destined to become one of the greatest of classical music.

Before he could embark upon his career as a composer, however, young Hector had to overcome the opposition of his parents. As a doctor and a member of the provincial gentry, Louis Berlioz hoped that his eldest son would follow in his footsteps and choose a career in either the medical or legal professions. Yet while Hector did well in his medical training in Paris, every free minute was spent in attending the musical and theatrical performances in France’s cultural capital. As Cairns details, French music during this period was tied closely with theatrical performance and was overshadowed by the richer and more innovative scene in central Europe. This mattered little to Berlioz, who was so taken by the possibilities of composition that he convinced his parents to support him in his efforts to gain a musical education.

Louis hoped that Hector’s passion for music would pass, or that he would return to a more sensible career choice once he discovered he couldn’t make a go of it. Instead Berlioz thrived in his studies. Cairns explores closely Berlioz’s relationship with the composer Jean-François Le Seuer, who taught Berlioz as a private student for over three years before he was admitted to the Conservatoire in 1826, and who as a professor there continued to mentor him. Though Berlioz benefited from his studies with Le Seuer and Anton Reicha, much of his education took place through attendance of performances in the city’s theaters, where he encountered both Beethoven’s music and the plays of William Shakespeare. Whereas Beethoven inspired him Shakespeare served as source material of some of Berlioz’s ideas, which he immediately began developing in his compositions.

While Berlioz’s growing circle of friends appreciated his gifts, translating that into a career proved challenging. Here the problem lay with the conservatism of the Paris musical scene. Opportunities for performances were restricted by the number of venues approved by the government. Moreover, success in one form of music didn’t translate easily into acceptance of his other musical inspirations, making it a struggle simply to win credibility for the wide variety of musical forms in which Berlioz experimented. It was through a restraint imposed in order to play the game that allowed Berlioz to win the coveted Prix de Rome in 1830, which allowed him to study in Rome at the French Academy there. This proved a stay in which little of note was produced but where the seeds of many of his later works were sown, all of which would blossom over the remainder of his long and successful career.

Cairns ends the book with the triumph of Berlioz’s concert at the Conservatoire in 1832 and his meeting with Harriet Smithson, the Anglo-Irish actress who would be his first wife. Much lay ahead for Berlioz, yet it is a testament to Cairns’s skills as a writer that many readers will finish his book not exhausted by the detail but eager to press on to the second volume. His description of Berlioz’s life is extensively researched and richly insightful, yet moves with a grace that makes reading about it a pleasure. Though a knowledge of music, especially of classical music, is necessary to get the most out of Cairns’s analysis of Berlioz’s achievements, his book is rewarding reading just for the details of Berlioz’s life or the cultural history of 19th century France more generally. It all makes for a magnificent book that is not only unlikely to be surpassed as a study of Berlioz but is one of the best biographies of a composer ever written. Nobody interested in Berlioz or classical music more generally can afford to ignore it.… (mais)

The conclusion to David Cairns's epic biography of Hector Berlioz has been eagerly awaited ever since the first volume, Berlioz: The Making of an Artist, appeared in 1989. With an achievement as massive as that highly praised volume, part of the tension of waiting for the follow-up involves wondering whether Cairns can capture again the sweep, the vividness, and the power of his first book. But he has managed to do exactly that.

Cairns picks up the story at the time of Berlioz's marriage to Harriet Smithson in 1833, with whom he had been obsessively infatuated for so long. It's a mournful story, with her alcoholism, their separation in 1844, and her premature death in 1854. Cairns links the vicissitudes of Berlioz's own life directly with his music: the composition of La Mort d'Ophélie marks the symbolic end of their marriage. "The elegiac significance of this infinitely sad melody would be hard to miss." Cairns writes sensitively and evocatively about Berlioz's music, and one of the central pillars of this second volume is a compelling defense of the composer's Les Troyens (1856), his much-maligned and chopped-about operatic masterpiece. Critics of the day were not kind: "so vulgar, so badly designed and so distorted with impossible modulations that one would take it to be the music of a deaf man," said one. There were many cartoons, which Cairns reprints, along the lines of "new method of killing cattle to be introduced at all slaughterhouses," in which an ox is pictured felled by having The Trojans played to it through a large tuba. But Cairns convincingly demonstrates just how far ahead of his time Berlioz was and how heroic was his struggle to have this titanic opera performed and accepted in the teeth of persistent obstacles. It is Cairns's opinion that Berlioz, "like the biblical man, was born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards." His biography follows the tragedies and the triumphs of this larger-than-life individual with a narrative force as gripping as a good novel. --Adam Roberts… (mais)

At over 1500 pages, this monumental two-volume biography of France's greatest Romantic composer well deserves the accolades it will surely receive from musicologists. Cairns, chief music critic of the (London) Sunday Times from 1983 to 1992 and a distinguished visiting professor at the University of California at Davis, wrote the first volume more than ten years ago and published it only in Britain. Here, he presents a revised and corrected edition for American readers, along with the long-awaited second volume, which is nearly as voluminous. The sequel picks up the biographical thread in 1833 with the introduction of Harriet Smithson, the English actress who became Berlioz's muse, obsession, and wife. While the accounts of their tempestuous marriage make for fascinating and, at times, hair-raising reading, some of the most memorable passages are by Berlioz himself. His prose reveals him to have been a somewhat reluctant, often caustic, but always perceptive music critic. Both volumes are pure life narratives; there is no musical analysis, nor are there musical examples. At times readers, awash in biographical detail, may wish for more information on the music itself, but Cairns's prose is so elegant and readable, his subject so fascinating, and his scholarship so impressive that they will forgive him. Truly a definitive study, these two volumes belong in all major collections.
-Larry A. Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA

Cairns tells the story with sober elegance and uncommon sympathy. He is a marvelous guide to the musical life and aesthetic arguments of 19th-century Europe and shows Berlioz as a man of his times.… (mais)