Berlioz made his first appearance in a German music newspaper on 6 June 1829; the first German concert review of one of his works came out six months later, on 30 December. By the mid-eighteen-thirties, information on Berlioz in the press d’outre-Rhin is no longer rare. How in fact did news about Berlioz find its way from Paris to Germany? This is the subject of the current article, whose purpose is to call attention to important and hitherto little-known or neglected sources of early Berlioz reception in Germany—little-known or neglected in part because they exist in German, and many modern Berlioz scholars, particularly the English speakers and the French, have yet to take the full measure of their import.

In collaboration with Arnold Jacobshagen, I have, in the volume mentioned in note 1, assembled a substantial amount of new material from the German press. Some significant documents, however, did not find their way into that book. I shall thus include quotations from those documents in this article, which the reader may wish to regard as a complement to Hector Berlioz in Deutschland.

Precisely how would a German journalist working in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century have done research about Berlioz’s life, work, and impact? In what follows, I should like to suggest, in the form of a “journalist’s handbook,” with historical examples as needed, seven ways he might have gone about that task.

The first step would be to consult a “Who’s Who” of the contemporary world of Parisian culture—for in fact such directories did then exist. The following entry is taken from a dictionary of artists edited in 1831 by the painter Charles Gabet: