Some Thoughts on the Musicologist as Biographer

Abstract

The full-length and works study, a genre rooted in an age that took art as a narrative-frequently autobiographical-form of human expression, remains a central, increasingly complex undertaking for musicologists. Dahlhaus asserts that it is an outdated fiction to assume a piece of music can only be understood in the context of the life of its composer.' If so, are any meaningful connections between life and work still possible? The purveyors of popular culture still think so; cinema and TV have spawned new fictions in the and genre, complete with background music by the composer. (What a screen spectacle the life and times of Berlioz would make!) In spite of all this, the critical biography remains a vigorous and challenging mode of inquiry. Berlioz's music and life embody a creative aesthetic that would appear to be totally contradicted by Brahms. And as for Liszt, do we not have here a subject whose life is arguably as important as the music? To suggest, as Dahlhaus does, that musical biography, along with the aesthetic of expression, has gone into a decline in the twentieth century is spectacularly contradicted by the example of three of our century's greatest composers-Mahler, Shostakovich, and Britten-whose work may reasonably be taken as a report on human experience. But then there is the antiromantic aesthetic of a Stravinsky whose life and work would seem to be a formidable repudiation of the life and times point of view. What is a composer's biographer to do? In an age of authentic texts and the analysis of original sketches, the biographical study must serve the needs of the analyst and the practical musician, as well as the historian and general reader. Real life is bound to reveal painful discrepancies between its demands and those of art, and faithful biographers cannot afford to whitewash their subjects. What emphasis should be given to Berlioz's relations with Louis, his son by Harriet Smithson, or the