The Art of Music and Other Essays

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was equally prominent as composer and music critic. A Travers Chants is the collection of writings he himself selected from his thirty-odd years of musical journalism. His essays cover a wide spectrum of intellectual inquiry: Beethoven's nine symphonies; Wagner and the "Music of the Future"; Berlioz's idols--Gluck, Weber, and Mozart. There is even an eloquent plea to stop the constant rise in concert pitch, an issue still of vital interest. But they also contain biting satire and ridicule--of opera singers, of the Academy, of dilettantism. This new translation, phrased in lively, idiomatic English and annotated for the twentieth-century reader, is illustrated with lithographs and drawings from Berlioz's lifetime.