The Life and Times of Hector Berlioz

The Life and Times of Hector Berlioz PDF

Author: Jim Whiting

Publisher: Mitchell Lane

Published: 2019-12-05

Total Pages: 73

ISBN-13: 1545748896

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French composer Hector Berlioz believed in love at first sight. When he was 23, he attended a performance of Shakespeare s play Hamlet and fell head over heels in love with Harriet Smithson, an English actress who had a leading role. Harriet didn t show any interest in him. She ignored his letters. When he tried to meet her backstage, she ordered the guard to throw him out.Berlioz was hurt and angry. He wanted revenge. He got it by murdering Harriet �musically. She inspired Symphonie fantastique, his most famous work. The hero kills his beloved, is executed for the crime, and the symphony ends with a bizarre dance of ghosts, goblins, and other monsters.

The Life and Times of Hector Berlioz

The Life and Times of Hector Berlioz PDF

Author: Jim Whiting

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 9781584152590

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French composer Hector Berlioz believed in love at first sight. When he was 23, he attended a performance of Shakespeare's play Hamlet and fell head over heels in love with Harriet Smithson, an English actress who had a leading role. Harriet didn't show any interest in him. She ignored his letters. When he tried to meet her backstage she ordered the guard to throw him out. Berlioz was hurt and angry. He wanted revenge. He got it by murdering Harriet-musically. She inspired Symphonie fantastique, his most famous work. The hero kills his beloved, is executed for the crime, and the symphony ends with a bizare dance of ghosts, goblins and other monsters. In real life, Berlioz met Harriet several years later. He put on a special concert for her that included a performance of Symphonie fantastique. Harriet was impressed. Soon she fell in love with him and they were married. Did they live happily ever after? Book jacket.

The Life of Berlioz

The Life of Berlioz PDF

Author: Peter Bloom

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-11-19

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780521485487

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The Life of Berlioz situates the celebrated French musician in the vibrant and highly politicized musical culture of the periods of the Bourbon Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Empire in which he lived and worked as composer, conductor, concert manager, and writer. The author of the Symphonie fantastique was indeed possessed of a fertile and fantastical imagination; but the common image of Berlioz as a misunderstood and mistreated genius obscures both the solidity of his work as a musical architect and the reality of his position as one sometimes favored by those in power. Berlioz is the quintessential romantic composer by dint of the conspicuous intermingling of art and life that marks his musical and literary output. Studying this away from the subjective sentimentality that can still mar studies of the composer in France, serves only to enhance the uncommon radiance of his music and uncommon esprit of his art.

Berlioz

Berlioz PDF

Author: David Cairns

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 946

ISBN-13: 9780520240582

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Praise for Berlioz, Volume I "We now have a biography that not only takes in the immense documentation of Berlioz's early life but goes far beyond it in piecing together an incomparably rich portrait of the man and his milieu. . . . The picture is so vivid and the prose so magnetic that not a word seems wasted. . . . Cairns's biography of Berlioz must take its place with the handful of great lives of composers, such as Thayer's Beethoven, Newman's Wagner, and Walker's Wolf."--Hugh MacDonald, The Listener "Even at this halfway stage, [Cairns's] Berlioz stands as one of the great biographies of our day, and also one of the great feats of literary sympathy with an artistic genius, filled with a love, knowledge, and understanding of his subject that flame up on every page."--Max Loppert, Financial Times "This biography is kindled by sympathy and enthusiasm for its subject, and is written with a lifelong professional experience of Berlioz behind it. It is also beautifully and interestingly written. The chapters flow together like Berlioz's own harmonic changes, and with equal resonance."--Roger Norrington, Independent