Review: The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz: Travels with the Orchestra, by Inge van Rij

Abstract

The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz: Travels with the Orchestra , by Inge van Rij. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xii, 357 pp. For a century after his death in 1869 Berlioz maintained a curious toehold in the Western musical canon. He was revered as a master of orchestration, yet critics and scholars were often hesitant to approve of his bombastic, genre-bending compositions. Even after the publication in 1950 of Jacques Barzun's magisterial Berlioz and the Romantic Century , which ignited the contemporary field of Berlioz studies, the composer still remained for many an ambivalent figure. In the more than six decades since Barzun's study, musicologists have continued their efforts to improve Berlioz's reputation, not only by supplying new translations of his writings and fresh biographical studies, but also by rethinking his approach to musical form and investigating anew his debt to various extramusical sources. Inge van Rij's book contributes to these ongoing efforts by focusing on the ways Berlioz used the orchestra to explore “other worlds” of various kinds. It is concerned with French perceptions of foreign cultures and places during the nineteenth century, as well as the new self-understandings that were forged from these perceptions. Accordingly, van Rij examines several of Berlioz's orchestral compositions alongside his own writings, arguing that a “dialectic of Otherness” (p. 10) underlies both. In its attempt to analyze and interrelate Berlioz's music and writings, as well as in its examination of the ideological content that can be revealed by music analysis, The Other Worlds of Hector …