Ernest Newman's Draft of a Berlioz Biography (1899) and its Appropriation of Emile Hennequin's Style Theory

Abstract

Ernest Newman (1868–1959) first proposed a biography of Berlioz in the 1890s. A schedule for its research and writing was hatched, an agreement was made with a publisher for its manufacture, and Newman promptly set to work on the project. Alas, like so many other book projects Newman commenced in the 1890s, the Berlioz biography was never completed. Even though sketches or drafts of the book do not survive, there is plenty of evidence of the methodology and structure that Newman proposed for the book, for a work-in-progress article, ‘The prose of Berlioz,’ was published in the Chord in June 1899. It is a remarkable essay for its engagement with Berlioz's prose works and for its theorizing on musical biography. I illustrate that Newman's biographical method was partly inspired by the work of Emile Hennequin (1858–93), and was an approach that Newman had previously used in some of his literary criticism. However, I argue that despite Newman's claim of Hennequin's influence, the article's wider influence came from a larger pool of writers working on style theory, including Walter Pater, Walter Raleigh and J.A. Symonds.