Volume 14, Number 1 & 2 · January 29, 1970
Berlioz, Boulez, and Piaf
By Virgil Thomson
The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz
translated by David Cairns
Knopf, 636 pp., $12.50
Baudelaire-Berlioz
Adam International Review
University of Rochester, N.Y. Nos. 331-333, 124 pp., $1.50
Berlioz and the Romantic Century
by Jacques Barzun
Columbia, 2 vols., 573 and 515, 3rd edition pp., $30.00
Berlioz and the Romantic Imagination
catalog of an exhibition organized by the Arts Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum on behalf of the Berlioz Centenary Committee in co-operation with the French Government
The Arts Council, 146 pp.
Pelléas et Mélisande
drame lyrique en 5 actes de Maurice Maeterlinck et Claude Debussy, partition d'orchestre, Durand (Paris, 1904), first performance by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Dec. 1, 1969, Pierre Boulez, conductor
Piaf
by Simone Berteaut
Robert Laffont (Paris), 459 pp., 28 F (paper)
The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, in a new translation by David Cairns, I had got involved with as a book for possible review. Good reading it was too, all about music in Romantic times, written by a man who could really write and who was also a real composer. Nothing phony there, no self-deception, no bluffing, no self-pity, just the tale of a French musician who was successful in England, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Russia—everywhere but in France. Invited everywhere to remain, also to visit the United States for a very large fee, he could not keep away from Paris very long, where the cabals, intrigues, and dirty deals (in all of which he knew exactly who his enemy was and why and usually said so) gave to his career the aspect of an intermittent volcano as dangerous to the establishment as only a clear mind with a sharp tongue can be.
Review, 5242 words
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