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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"Berlioz believed neither in God nor in Bach, neither in absolute beauty in art nor in pure virtue in life,"his friend Ferdinand Hiller recalled. The composer of the "Symphonie Fantastique"retains a fashionably satanic aura, and the reputation is well earned. The "Fantastique,"his masterpiece, anyone's masterpiece, remains a totally shocking work after all these years, and no modern music has ever really matched it. The symphony's inexhaustible novelty comes not from the discovery of new sounds--although there are many--but from the diabolical manipulation of familiar ones. The C-major coda is brilliant, triumphant, and horribly wrong, the God-given natural scale smeared with flat notes. Thus ends a voyage into Hell undertaken not for moral reasons but for the sheer joy of going under. As Satan remarks in "Paradise Lost,"explaining why Hell is better than Heaven, "Here at least we shall be free.”
Lincoln Center's festival in honor of the bicentennial of Berlioz's birth, which began with three astonishing concerts by the London Symphony Orchestra, is called "Fantastic Voyages: The Genius of Hector Berlioz."This hits the mark, although it was genius of a particular kind. Unlike Mozart, Schubert, and other prodigies born with music in their blood, Berlioz came to the art from the outside, in a spirit of intellectual adventure. He read about it in encyclopedias, imagined it in his dreams, and, in adolescence, decided to conquer it. He grew up in a small town in the South of France, where his musical diet consisted mainly of marching tunes, comic-opera ditties, and Gregorian chant. Not until around the time of his eighteenth birthday, in 1821, did he hear a full-scale classical work--"Les Danaides,"by Salieri. He had come to Paris to attend medical school, and he alarmed his fellow-students by singing Salieri's arias while sawing the skulls of cadavers.
Berlioz's understanding of music...
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