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Berlioz and “The Trojans” I: Forward from Beethoven
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
Berlioz was the most romantic of composers, and The Trojans was the climax of a steady pursuit of music-drama of one sort or another, translating the struggles of the human spirit and the human race into a rich, vivid and expanding musical life. Let us glance again at this historical procession of works of double-edged impact; some of them are familiar musical experience, but many are not. At first the drama was little more than a matter of providing suggestive titles for movements, of supplying literary analogies, in the post-revolutionary style, for contrasts that Beethoven had displayed in sheer symphony to perceptive listeners. (1808: “The andante is very original and attractive, composed as it is of the most heterogeneous ideas—gentle reverie and warlike fierceness.” 1809: “… the ordinary sequence of movements … but they seem fantastically linked together.”) There might be analogies, too, for the conflation of movements of varying genres, matching the ultra-modern, Beethoven idea of a symphony of one great rhapsody of genius.
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