This biography of composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) describes with unprecedented intimacy, affection, and respect the life of one of France's greatest artists. After long being regarded as an oddity and an eccentric figure, Berlioz is now being accepted into the ranks of the great composers. Based on a wealth of previously unpublished sources, and on a profound understanding of the humanity of his subject, David Cairns's book provides a full account of this extraordinary and powerfully attractive man.

Berlioz, Volume I, previously published only in Britain, is now available to American readers in a revised edition, together with the eagerly awaited, new Volume II. These two volumes together comprise a monumental biographical achievement, sure to stand as the definitive Berlioz biography.

In researching Berlioz's life, Cairns has had access to unpublished family papers, and in Volume I he is able to portray all the people close to Berlioz in his boyhood, and to evoke a detailed picture of their lives in and around La Côte St.-André in the foothills of the French Alps. No artist's achievement connects more directly with early experience than that of Berlioz, whose passionate sensibility began to absorb the material of his art long before he had heard any musical ensemble other than the local town band. Volume I also traces the student years in Paris and Italy and discusses Berlioz's three great love affairs, shedding remarkable light on his later character and development. Volume I ends on the afternoon of December 9, 1832, the day of the concert that launched the composer's career.

David Cairns was chief music critic of the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1992, having earlier been music critic and arts editor of the Spectator and a writer for the Financial Times and the New Statesman. From 1967 to 1972 he worked for the London branch of Phonogram. He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Center in Santa Monica.

"We now have a biography that not only takes in the immense documentation of Berlioz's early life but goes far beyond it in piecing together an incomparably rich portrait of the man and his milieu. . . . The picture is so vivid and the prose so magnetic that not a word seems wasted. . . . Cairns's biography of Berlioz must take its place with the handful of great lives of composers, such as Thayer's Beethoven, Newman's Wagner, and Walker's Wolf."—Hugh MacDonald, The Listener

"Even at this halfway stage, [Cairns's] Berlioz stands as one of the great biographies of our day, and also one of the great feats of literary sympathy with an artistic genius, filled with a love, knowledge, and understanding of his subject that flame up on every page."—Max Loppert, Financial Times

"This biography is kindled by sympathy and enthusiasm for its subject, and is written with a lifelong professional experience of Berlioz behind it. It is also beautifully and interestingly written. The chapters flow together like Berlioz's own harmonic changes, and with equal resonance."—Roger Norrington, Independent

"One of the richest and most accomplished biographies that I have read. The product of a lifetime's passionate immersion in his subject, Cairns's work has all the old-fashioned virtues and no serious flaws."—Times Literary Supplement

"A sumptuous feast for lovers of music and biography, this volume feeds the appetite to learn the reasons behind how the story turns out." —Kirkus Reviews

"If only [Berlioz's] detractors could have read this monumental two-volume life of the artist. One comes away stunned by the book's scope, its heroic and faithful portrait of the man, its astute and elegant readings of his under-appreciated scores, its sweeping study of the Romantic movement. Berlioz is simply one of the grandest, most penetrating musical biographies of our time."—Washington Post Book World

"In David Cairns, Berlioz has found a biographer who shares his sense of scale. There is not a dull or redundant page in the whole book. Mr. Cairns has lived, breathed and dreamt Berlioz for more than 20 years. He has visited the places Berlioz visited and read the books Berlioz read . . . You would no more want ot read a slimmed-down version of this book than you would an abridged version of David Copperfield . . . When he describes the music itself, his language is so vivid and so precise that one longs for more."—Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

"David Cairns has a wonderful story to tell and he tells it superbly well . . . This is a wonderful book, rich in detail and imbued with imaginative insights that stem from love. It is also written with an enviable blend of grace and energy."—Peter Heyworth, Observer

"Essential reading, not only for the ardent Berliozian but for anyone with an interest in the history of Romanticism. I can scarcely wait for the conclusion of this story, unquestionably one of the most important composer biographies of our time."—Hugh Canning, Guardian

"A full-scale new biography has long been needed, and now comes the first volume of David Cairns's long-promised, exhaustively researched and detailed study of the composer. It has been worth the wait . . . I would not have the book a page shorter. Volume Two cannot come soon enough, for it is already clear that Cairns is doing for Berlioz what Ernest Newman did for Wagner."—Michael Kennedy, Daily Telegraph

"One of the very few truly great musical biographies, which indeed matches the eloquence of Berlioz's own writing."—Michael Berkeley, Private Passions, Radio 3

"Cairns, for many years the chief music critic of The Sunday Times in London, tells the story with sober elegance and uncommon sympathy. He is a marvelous guide to the musical life and aesthetic arguments of 19th-century Europe and shows Berlioz as a man of his times. But he also brings Berlioz close to us. He shares his enthusiasm for the music and makes it luminously accessible to nonmusicians. . . . In Cairns he [Berlioz] has found one of the great musical biographers."—New York Times Book Review

"An outstanding biography."—New York Times Book Review "Summer Reading Issue"

"David Cairns spent 40 years working on this biography. The vastness of its scale is altogether appropriate to its subject. To be sure, it takes a considerable commitment of time and effort to get through these two volumes. But they are well worth it, since one finished with the sense of having almost lived for a space of time with a great and honorable man."—Philadelphia Inquirer

"Just as Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, Les Troyens and Requiem usually leave listeners stunned and exhilarated, so David Cairns' massive biography will have readers gasping for breath as they turn each page…A project bound to stand as long as the music is heard. As overwhelming as the music."—Dallas Morning News

"An outstanding biography argues persuasively that Berlioz was 'the greatest French composer between Rameau and Dubussy.'"—Rocky Mountain News

"The strength of Cairns's biography lies in its thoroughness of research, its amplitude, its authority, and its author's remarkable sensitivity and sympathy for Berlioz-indeed, for all those around him." —The New Republic

"Cairns' work is truly an epic, as large in design as his subject's 'La Damnation de Faust' or 'Romeo et Juliette.'"—Washington Post Book World

Named a "Notable Book of 2000" by the New York Times Book Review

"David Cairns's BERLIOZ wins this year's Whitbread Biography Award for his masterly evocation of the inner man as well as the outer world in which he lived and worked.The judges felt that this biography is a work of art in itself which will still be enjoyed and admired in centuries to come." —Whitbread Biography Award Committee

ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in the Symphonic Books category, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers

Berlioz Society Home Page

Berlioz 2003 Committee