UNTIL a few decades ago, the music of Hector Berlioz was for most Americans a silent enigma. Otherwise reasonable critics wrote of his “half-crazy ideas.” Grove’s Dictionary bemoaned his alleged lapses into bad taste and deplored his emphasis on “emphasis” (whatever that means) rather than “beauty.” Even Stravinsky, who should have known better, dismissed Berlioz in 1938 as a “romantic orgiast.” Until the LP and CD eras, most people had little more to go on than a few excerpts on the old shellacs. This has changed; now almost all his work is available on records.
Berlioz was a conductor as well as a composer—his treatise on conducting is still a standard text, although Wagner, who shamelessly stole whole passages from Berlioz, referred to him as a “vulgar time-beater”—and his orchestration, after Beethoven had breached the walls of classicism, exploded into what we call “romanticism.” What he sought was to express melodically what cannot be expressed in language.
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