The musical criticism and philosophizing of Hector Berlioz in 1852
took on a very special form, ingenious and entertaining. Filing his
commentary in the guise of tales told by members of the opera
orchestra during the performance of mediocre operas in a civilized
town, he commences to slash at the professional nature of tenors,
claques, crowd worship, to lay out a utopian musical city called
Euphonia, to opine on French salon ladies and composers. Spontini,
Jenny Lind, Peganini, and many other musicians are considered in
the tales, some absorbing as excellent pieces of story telling. One
waits for the nights when the orchestra does not babble - the
nights when they attentively play the masterpieces-and for the
names of the operas - Freischuts, Fidelio, Rather of Seville. Don
?? Iphigenia in Tauris, Les Huguenots. While the device becomes
burdensome at times, this is minor cant for convinced music lovers.
(Kirkus Reviews)
During the performances of fashionable operas in an unidentified
but "civilized" town in northern Europe, the musicians (with the
exception of the conscientious bass drummer) tell tales, read
stories, and exchange gossip to relieve the tedium of the bad music
they are paid to perform. In this delightful and now classic
narrative written by the brilliant composer and critic Hector
Berlioz, we are privy to twenty-five highly entertaining evenings
with a fascinating group of distracted performers. As we near the
two-hundredth anniversary of Berlioz's birth, Jacques Barzun's
pitch-perfect translation of Evenings with the Orchestra --with a
new foreword by Berlioz scholar Peter Bloom--testifies to the
enduring pleasure found in this most witty and amusing book.
"[F]ull of knowledge, penetration, good sense, individual wit,
stock humor, justifiable exasperation, understanding exaggeration,
emotion and rhetoric of every kind." --Randall Jarrell, New York
Times Book Review "To succeed in [writing these tales], as Berlioz
most brilliantly does, requires a combination of qualities which is
very rare, the many-faceted curiosity of the dramatist with the
aggressively personal vision of the lyric poet."--W. H. Auden, The
Griffin
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