Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:38:40.914Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Berlioz and “The Trojans” I: Forward from Beethoven

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

A. E. F. Dickinson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Berlioz was the most romantic of composers, and The Trojans was the climax of a steady pursuit of music-drama of one sort or another, translating the struggles of the human spirit and the human race into a rich, vivid and expanding musical life. Let us glance again at this historical procession of works of double-edged impact; some of them are familiar musical experience, but many are not. At first the drama was little more than a matter of providing suggestive titles for movements, of supplying literary analogies, in the post-revolutionary style, for contrasts that Beethoven had displayed in sheer symphony to perceptive listeners. (1808: “The andante is very original and attractive, composed as it is of the most heterogeneous ideas—gentle reverie and warlike fierceness.” 1809: “… the ordinary sequence of movements … but they seem fantastically linked together.”) There might be analogies, too, for the conflation of movements of varying genres, matching the ultra-modern, Beethoven idea of a symphony of one great rhapsody of genius.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 48 , Summer 1958 , pp. 24 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1958

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

1 Transcribed from Barzun, Jacques, Pleasures of Music, London, 1914.Google Scholar
2 For strong documentary support of this explanation of the controversial conclusion of the Fantastic Symphony, see ProfessorBarzun's, revealing notes in his Berlioz and the romantic century, London, 1951, I., 163. The whole book is an admirable exposition of Berlioz's creative method and personality, and positively corrects many misconceptions from a fresh and thorough study of the music and relevant commentary.Google Scholar
3 Consider, for example, those of Beck, Op. 3, Rosetti, , Wanhal, , Haydn, (39) and Mozart (25 and 40), all maintaining the minor key to a stoic finish, whereas Harold closes in an ironical major.Google Scholar
4 Pending inside explanation, one cannot understand how Scherchen ever agreed to record the work without the Troy Acts, even to the point of playing the Prelude which Berlioz, wrote, in desperation, for the mutilated première.Google Scholar