The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz.

Translated and edited by David Cairns Everyman's Library (Knopf), 720pp. $25

Hector Berlioz, in his mid-twenties, nearly destitute and largely self-taught, found himself chased out of the Paris Conservatory library one morning by its director, composer Luigi Cherubini. The pretext was that he had used the wrong entryway, but more to the point, Berlioz probably looked like the wrong sort. Cherubini and the porter, "to the stupefaction of the onlookers ... began pursuing me round the table, knocking over stools and reading-desks in a vain attempt to catch me. In the end, I made my escape, calling out with a laugh as I fled, `You shan't have me or my name, and I shall soon be back again to study Gluck's scores.' That was my first encounter with Cherubini."

Exaggerated or not, the scene tells a good deal about the young iconoclast, as well as prefiguring his lifelong difficulties with musical officialdom in his own land, where his only steady employment was as a music critic. The repeated frustrations from canceled commissions, non-payment, inept performances (of music called "unplayable"), bureaucratic plots and hurdles overshadow the successes he won in Britain, Germany and even Russia. His revenge is in the telling, often with biting satirical humor.

As a writer of prose, no less than in his operas, songs and symphonies, Berlioz is the consummate dramatist. Dialogue springs spontaneously from his pen, irony seasons even the worst perfidies, but above all the reader is riveted by the author's gift for epitomizing a situation, a personality, sometimes a life, in a highly colored, instantly ignited scene.

Although he is reticent about his romances and marriages (if not about his youthful ...