Hector Berlioz: A Romantic Tragedy

by Herbert F. Peyser

HERBERT F. PEYSER

Hector Berlioz
A Romantic Tragedy

Written for and dedicated to
the
RADIO MEMBERS
of
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK

Copyright 1949
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK
113 West 57th Street
New York 19, N. Y.

1865—Berlioz—Theme from the beginning of the Fantastique Symphony

FOREWORD

A thumbnail sketch like the present is, of course, the last place in the world to recount even an infinitesimal part of a life so vivid and crowded with bitter conflict and tragic experience as that of Hector Berlioz; and the person who attempts it is beaten in advance. Moreover, such an effort seems almost gratuitous. For Berlioz has told his own story better than anyone else could possibly do it. When Ernest Newman was asked at one time to write a new biography of the epoch-making composer he informed the publisher who suggested it that “no Life by any other hands will ever be able to bear comparison as a piece of literature with Berlioz’ Autobiography. All others are for the most part a watering down into the author’s inferior style of the sparkling prose of Berlioz himself”. How much more futile is it to attempt on the minuscule scale of the following tiny, if rambling, pamphlet to touch upon even a thousandth of those achievements and unremitting conflicts which entered into the texture of this master’s agitated and inharmonious life! Actually, it aims to do no more than contribute a mite toward a larger interest in the writings and the great mass of insufficiently discovered compositions of a Romanticist whose labors are still surprisingly unrecognized art works of the future.

H. F. P.