Richard Bratby

The Berlioz problem

Plus: WNO’s Un ballo in maschera is worth catching for the playing and singing but don’t expect to understand what’s going on

issue 23 February 2019

Hector Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803 in rural Isère. ‘During the months which preceded my birth my mother never dreamed, as Virgil’s did, that she was about to bring forth a laurel branch,’ he writes in his Memoirs. ‘This is extraordinary, I agree, but it is true… Can it be that our age is lacking in poetry?’ And so on, for nearly 600 candid, facetious, outspoken pages.

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