Berlioz
Why we love requiems
Alexandra Coghlan on the enduring appeal of requiems
Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers: the raucous world of 19th century British music
The world of 19th-century British music was raucous, but are there any masterpieces waiting to be rediscovered? wonders Richard Bratby
The rude, ripe tastelessness of John Eliot Gardiner’s Berlioz is the perfect antidote to Haitink’s Instagram Bruckner
Conducting is one of those professions — being monarch is perhaps another — where the less you do, the more…
If opera survives, it’ll be thanks to artists and curators, not opera houses
It was bucketing it down in Venice, yet the beach was heaving. Families, lovebirds, warring kids, a yappy mutt, all…
David Cairns explains how we learned to love Berlioz
According to his friend and fellow-composer Ernest Reyer, the last words Berlioz spoke on his deathbed were: ‘They are finally…
How good really was Berlioz?
Hector Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803 in rural Isère. ‘During the months which preceded my birth my mother…
Why wasn’t Poetry Please in the Radio Times’s top 30 greatest radio shows of all time?
With the upsurge of listeners to Classic FM (now boasted to be 5.6 million listeners each week) and the imminent…
Dau is not just a pretentious fraud – it’s rather disgusting
The best booers, in my experience, are the Germans. There’s real purpose and thickness to their vocals. Italians hiss. The…
A recording that makes you realise Les Troyens is one of the greatest operatic masterpieces
Grade: A- Berlioz’s Les Troyens, one of the greatest operatic masterpieces, manages to be neglected even if it is…
Irish ayes
Luigi Cherubini is the pantomime villain of French romantic music. As head of the Paris Conservatoire in the 1820s he…
Long live ENO!
The three most moving, transporting death scenes in 19th-century opera all involve the respective heroines mounting a funeral pyre —…
Mariinsky’s Les Troyens — a bad night for Berlioz and Edinburgh
I wonder whether grand opéra really takes war as seriously as this year’s Edinburgh Festival wanted it to. These vast…
Terry Gilliam turns to eye-watering excess for his staging of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini
Operas about artists are not rare. However — perhaps for obvious reasons — those artists tend to be musicians, singers,…
