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 Based on a wealth of previously unpublished sources, and on a profound understanding of the humanity of his subject, David Cairns's book provides a full account of this extraordinary and powerfully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.

Volume II follows Berlioz's life from 1832 to his death in 1869, his most active years as a composer, conductor, and critic. This volume provides telling portraits of those close to Berlioz: his two wives, his son and his sisters, his friends and colleagues, fellow composers and critics. Cairns vividly evokes Berlioz's music and the music-making world of nineteenth-century Paris. Volume II also includes chapters on Wagner, Berlioz's career as a critic, the composer's concert tours in Germany, Russia, and England, and much more.

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.

"Artistic mastery fraught with tribulation propels this grand finale to the career of a paramount Romantic creator." —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

"It is clear that not one of the many hours of reading, listening and thinking, and not one of the many miles of travelling which Cairns has devoted to his subject has been wasted. The reader is left with a comprehensive record of Berlioz's view of the world and with a sense of having suffered his hardships and shared his triumphs: servitude and greatness indeed. It is hard to imagine that any new biography of Berlioz will be needed fifty, or even a hundred, years from now." —Times Literary Supplement

"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

"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

"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



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

Praise for Berlioz, Volume I:

"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

Whitbread Biography Award (UK)
2000 Samuel Johnson Non-Fiction Prize, anonymous sponsor