Volume 31, Number 7 · April 26, 1984
Battle over Berlioz
By Charles Rosen
The Musical Language of Berlioz
by Julian Rushton
Cambridge University Press, 303 pp., $49.50
Perhaps the cruelest remark ever made about Berlioz came from Mendelssohn, who said that what was so Philistine about Berlioz was that 'with all his efforts to go stark mad he never once succeeds.' Donald Francis Tovey, who quotes this in his essay on Berlioz's Harold in Italy,[1] comments that 'from its own standpoint the criticism was neither unfriendly nor untrue.' (I feel sure that Berlioz would have found it unfriendly.) Mendelssohn, in fact, liked Berlioz personally. He considered the music 'indifferent drivel, mere grunting, shouting and screaming back and forth,' but thought the composer himself a 'friendly, quiet, meditative person' with an acute critical sense for everything except his own work, and he was depressed by the contrast.[2]
Review, 4747 words
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