ABSTRACT
In the introduction to his translation of Hector Berlioz's memoirs, David Cairns writes, “Today … the characteristics that once made [Berlioz's music] bizarrely unconventional … are once again quite natural; his originality, without having lost its vividness, no longer seems eccentric” (Berlioz 2002, xi). Cairns is right, in that anyone who studies Berlioz's music with the care and attention it deserves will learn that many of the all-too-common characterizations of it do not hold true: It is formless, slapdash, so strange as to elude comprehension, and resistant to analysis. Berlioz is understood better now than ever before, so students of his work are less likely to throw up their hands or, worse, to cast aspersions when his music does not behave as expected. Few today would rail so strongly against the “singular perversity” and “technical defi ciencies” of Berlioz's music or would argue that the fi rst movement of the Symphonie fantastique “simply breaks with all the fundamental rules of the art, and that not with the iconoclasm of a reformer, but with the awkwardness of a tyro,” as W.H. Hadow (1904, 313) did in the early part of the last century. Th anks to the great strides made by the “new Berliozians” in the 1990s 1 and the even newer Berliozians in the past few years, Berlioz is now beginning to be seen as the true craft sman he was–a heady and exuberant craft sman, to be sure, but more mindfully experimental than “bizarrely unconventional.”
