Ten years after the acclaimed first volume of his mammoth biography of Berlioz, David Cairns has finished the job in style. This achievement is all the more remarkable when one considers the formidable competition: Berlioz himself, whose Memoirs (which Cairns himself has edited and translated) is the finest work of its kind written by a musician, and one of the supreme masterpieces of nineteenth century autobiography. Indeed, the copious extracts Cairns includes from Berlioz's many writings, public and private, reinforce the impression that he was one of the great literary stylists of his time, with a unique knack for the apposite quotation and trenchant metaphor. No fewer than 23 pages of letters are cited as documentation of his state of mind during the composition of his magnum opus, the opera Les Troyens; one feels grateful for Cairns's generosity rather than suspicious that he might be passing the buck.
Inevitably this is a revisionist book, both as regards the life and the work, and in each case I feel that Cairns has made his case admirably. To the conventional image - applicable to life and oeuvre alike - of Berlioz as Byronic romantic swinging from extreme to extreme without ever quite hitting reality (the blurb refers to "one of the archetypal romantic lives"), Cairns opposes a more classical figure loyal both to composers of the preceding century (Gluck rather than Bach, however), and to the two authors whose works had permeated his childhood: Shakespeare and Virgil. The former served as inspiration for the King Lear overture, the Romeo et Juliette symphony, and the opera Beatrice et Benedict (a somewhat anti-climactic swansong), while the latter provided the basis for Les Troyens. Against the perception of the Requiem as a piece of gargantuan megalomania, Cairns locates the piece in a mainstream tradition of French public music as typified by Berlioz's teacher Le Sueur (whose importance to Berlioz belies the myth of the latter's autodidacticism), paradoxically but convincingly stresses its "restraint", and argues cogently that its driving force is "the absence of God."
Similarly, Berlioz's notoriously tangled love life is sympathetically brought down to earth. True, in courting the Irish actress Harriet Smithson without having met her, he was at first pursuing an incarnation of Shakespeare's Ophelia rather than a woman of flesh and blood. True, his eventual marriage to her was unequal to the strain of their lives' opposed trajectories (her career was in steep decline). Nevertheless, their relationship was by no means the chimera as which it has hitherto been caricatured: "longer than most biographers have given it credit for, the marriage brought a degree of fulfilment to them both". True, having in his early adolescence devoured Florian's pastoral romance Estelle et Nimorin and identified himself with its infatuated hero, it was inevitable that he would promptly fall in love with a local girl named Estelle, unattainable because four years his senior.
A half-century later, after everyone he loved had died (including his son Louis), he suddenly and quixotically embarked in pursuit of Estelle, now a matronly widow. Berlioz's account of this episode in the epilogue to his Memoirs provoked Offenbach's sneer: "stupide Romeo". And yet, after her initial and understandable confusion, Estelle became a friend and confidante, thus providing one of the few areas of light in the dark canvas of the composer's final years.
BERLIOZ'S lifelong professional frustrations provide a good argument for the existence of Aosdana. The re is little doubt that his composition suffered from the necessity to make a living from journalism, the "brutal, brainless profession of reviewer" that constituted the "servitude" of the title (lifted from de Vigny). His final descent into nihilism and creative sterility is a harrowing tale indeed, told by Cairns with as much leavening as he can muster.
His posthumous reputation has fluctuated wildly, the all-pervasive cult of Wagner having done him no good, and France itself has seemed particularly ambivalent about his worth (the unabridged Les Troyens still awaits its Paris premiere!). Cairns makes the case for his subject's greatness with discretion and without exaggeration - but also without musical examples, one of which is worth a thousand words. Nonetheless, since reading these two volumes I have listened to Berlioz with new ears: a biographer can earn no higher tribute.
Raymond Deane is a composer and author