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Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14 (Episode in the Life of an Artist) (Dover Miniature Scores)
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Treatise on Instrumentation
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The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz has long been considered to be among the best of musical autobiographies. Like his massive compositions, Berlioz (1803-69) was colorful, eloquent, larger than life. His book is both an account of his important place in the rise of the Romantic movement and a personal testament. He tells the story of his liaison with Harriet Smithson, and his even more passionate affairs of the mind with Shakespeare, Scott, and Byron. Familiar with all the great figures of the age, Berlioz paints brilliant portraits of Liszt, Wagner, Balzac, Weber, and Rossini, among others. And through Berlioz's intimate and detailed self-revelation, there emerges a profoundly sympathetic and attractive man, driven, finally, by his overwhelming creative urges to a position of lonely eminence. For this new Everyman's edition of The Memoirs, the translator--the composer's most admired biographer--has completely revised the text and the extensive notes to take into account the latest research..
Price: $14.98
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Berlioz Studies (Cambridge Composer Studies)
This book contains nine essays by leading Berlioz scholars on various aspects of the great nineteenth-century musician's life and work. Among the pieces studied closely are Romeo et Juliette, La Damnation de Faust and Les Nuits d' été. An essay on newly discovered documents gives us a revealing portrait of the artist as a young man; another essay which examines little studied manuscripts shows us how precisely Berlioz arranged Gluck's celebrated opera Orphée. The practical question of Berlioz's metronome marks are studied thoroughly for the first time, and the volume closes with a novel piece in dialogue form by the elder statesman of Berlioz scholars, Jacques Barzun, who treats with exceptional grace the profound issues raised by Berlioz the man and the musician..
Price: $75.01
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Berlioz: Volume Two: Servitude and Greatness, 1832-1869
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.
Price: $21.00
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The Music of Berlioz
This is the first full-length musical study of Berlioz to take into account the rediscovered Messe solennelle. Julian Rushton discusses all aspects of his work, without undue emphasis on a few more popular pieces. The first section consists of a comprehensive biography of Berlioz's musical works, tracing shifting patterns of productivity, approaches to genre, and the contrast between works which are aesthetically progressive or retrospective. The author then considers aspects of Berlioz's musical style, building upon earlier studies by the author and other recent scholarship. The final section offers a more substantial analysis of selected passages and an overall critical assessment..
Price: $65.95
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Symphony
In 1827 Harriet Smithson, a beautiful and talented young Irish actress, makes an unusual decision. Determined to avoid the traditional route to stardom via the manager’s bed, she joins an English company in the bold experiment of taking Shakespeare to Paris.
With the ferment of revolution in the air, the new generation is longing for a novel kind of passionate, spontaneous art. And to Harriet’s astonishment, it is embodied in her---La Belle Irlandaise. In the midst of this frenzy she finds herself pursued by a strange, intense young composer named Hector Berlioz. So begins a painful and profound love affair. She is his muse, his idée fixe, his obsession; and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, directly inspired by Harriet, will change music forever.
Symphony is an audacious, brilliant, and haunting novel, set against a background of nineteenth-century theatre, Romantic art, music, and revolutionary Europe. But at its heart lies the story of two lives transfigured and destroyed by genius, inspiration, and madness.
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Price: $5.70
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