Berlioz: Romantic and Classic

It is fairly safe to say that there is no musician about whom people differ so strongly as about Berlioz. His case is, indeed, unique. We are pretty well agreed as to the relative positions of the other men; roughly speaking, all cultivated musicians would put Wagner and Brahms and Beethoven in the first rank of composers, and Mendelssohn, Grieg, and Dvoràk in the second or third. Even in the case of a disputed problem like Strauss, the argument among those who know his work is not, I take it, as to his being a musician of the first rank, but as to the precise position he occupies among the others of that limited regiment. Upon Berlioz, however, the world seems unable to make up its mind. The dispute here is not as to where he stands among the great ones, but whether he really belongs to the great ones at all. Though there is no absolute unanimity of opinion upon the total work of, say, Wagner or Beethoven — no complete agreement as to the amount of weakness that is bound up with their strength — there is at all events perfect unanimity of opinion that Wagner and Beethoven are of the royal line. But we have Berlioz extolled to the skies by one section of competent musicians, while another section can scarcely speak of him politely; he really seems to create a kind of physical nausea in them; and some of them even deny his temperament to have been really musical. There is surely nothing in the history of music to parallel the situation…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ernest Newman, born in 1868 and died in 1959, was a major English music critic and musicologist of the 20th century. Self-taught in music, he began his career in journalism while working at a bank. He published early works on Gluck and Wagner in the 1890s. Known for his intellectually rigorous and objective criticism, he stood apart from more subjective contemporaries. He wrote for the Sunday Times for nearly forty years and authored landmark studies on Wagner, Hugo Wolf, and Richard Strauss.