A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival.

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and explain. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our solar system,” the likes of which would never be seen again. Here, as in later accounts, Berlioz was simply too strange—along with too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre and form, and too difficult to analyze. He was, in many ways, a composer without a world.

Berlioz and His World takes a deep dive into the composer’s complex legacy, tracing lines between his musical and literary output and the scientific, sociological, technological, and political influences that shaped him. Comprising eight essays covering key facets of Berlioz’s contributions and six short object lessons meant as conversation-starters, the book reveals Berlioz as a richly intersectional figure. His very difficulty, his tendency to straddle the worlds of composer, conductor, and critic, is revealed as a strength, inviting new lines of cross-disciplinary inquiry and a fresh look at his European and American reception.