Hector Berlioz
Writers

The first biography of Berlioz, by Eugène de Mirecourt, was published during the composer's lifetime. Holoman lists six other French biographies of the composer published in the four decades after his death. Of those who wrote for and against Berlioz's music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, among the most outspoken were musical amateurs such as the lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong, who called the composer's music variously "flatulent", "rubbish", and "the work of a tipsy chimpanzee", and, in the pro-Berlioz camp, the poet and journalist Walter J. Turner, who wrote what Cairns calls "exaggerated eulogies". Like Strong, Turner was, in the words of the music critic Charles Reid, "unhampered by any excess of technical knowledge".

Serious studies of Berlioz in the 20th century began with Adolphe Boschot 's L'Histoire d'un romantique (three volumes, 1906–1913). His successors were Tom S. Wotton, author of a 1935 biography, and Julien Tiersot, who wrote numerous scholarly articles on Berlioz and began the collection and editing of the composer's letters, a process eventually completed in 2016, eighty years after Tiersot's death. In the early 1950s the best-known Berlioz scholar was Jacques Barzun, a protégé of Wotton, and, like him, strongly hostile to many of Boschot's conclusions, which they saw as unfairly critical of the composer. Barzun's study was published in 1950. He was accused at the time by the musicologist Winton Dean of being excessively partisan, and refusing to admit failings and unevenness in Berlioz's music; more recently he has been credited by the musicologist Nicholas Temperley with playing a major part in improving the climate of musical opinion towards Berlioz.

Since Barzun, the leading Berlioz scholars have included David Cairns, D. Kern Holoman, Hugh Macdonald and Julian Rushton. Cairns translated and edited Berlioz's Mémoires in 1969, and published a two-volume, 1500-page study of the composer (1989 and 1999), described in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "one of the masterpieces of modern biography". Holoman was responsible for the publication in 1987 of the first thematic catalogue of Berlioz's works; two years later he published a single-volume biography of the composer. Macdonald was appointed in 1967 as the inaugural general editor of the New Berlioz Edition published by Bärenreiter; 26 volumes were issued between 1967 and 2006 under his editorship. He is also one of the editors of Berlioz's Correspondance générale, and author of a 1978 study of Berlioz's orchestral music, and of the Grove article on the composer. Rushton has published two volumes of analyses of Berlioz's music (1983 and 2001). The critic Rosemary Wilson said of his work, "He has done more than any other writer to explain the uniqueness of Berlioz's musical style without losing a sense of wonder in its originality of musical expression."
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