Berlioz: Volume Two, Servitude and Greatness
David Cairns
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 896pp, £25

In the 130 years since Hector Berlioz's death, the most powerful missionary enthusiasm for his music has been felt and acted on not in France, the land of his birth, but in Britain. Even quite recently a French wit could describe him as "le plus grand compositeur anglais", touching thereby not only on this outre-Manche passion for his music, but also on the complicated response of the French themselves to their greatest composer.

The concluding volume of David Cairns's Berlioz biography (the first, subtitled "1803-1832: The Making of an Artist", was published a decade ago) seems, in its breadth and depth, its profound love of and sympathy for the subject, to set a seal on the whole British adoptive process.

The start of that process was not untroubled: Berlioz's first visit to the country, in 1847, did a fair amount to establish his reputation but (because the London opera company for which he conducted went bankrupt) nothing to improve his always perilous finances. But the seed of British enthusiasm grew ever more vigorously, as conductors like Hallé in Manchester revealed the greatness of the music, followed in the 20th century by Harty, Henry Wood, Beecham, and in our day Norrington, Gardiner and (most potent British Berlioz champion of all) Colin Davis.

British musical writers and scholars such as Shaw, Ernest Newman and, in the post-war era, Wilfrid Mellers, Hugh Macdonald, Andrew Porter, and Cairns himself - quondam Spectator and Sunday Times critic - exploded the myth of "Berlioz the great Romantic eccentric" and "Berlioz the brilliant orchestrator but poor musical thinker". The time when the leading French critic Emile Vuillermoz could write "It is positively painful for a musician to have dealings with Berlioz's music, with its slapdash writing, clumsy style, and messy, chaotic methods of composition" (1939) seems not just decades but aeons past.

Unlike Hugh Macdonald and the American D Kern Holoman in their impressive English-language Berlioz studies, Cairns places music in a subordinate position to biography. "It is a life, not a life-and-works", the motto of the first volume, holds no less true for the second. This proves, however, no limitation, since a sense of the music flows through the book like a mighty river, affecting every corner of the landscape.

The first volume closed in the year of the Fantastic Symphony première. The second has the advantage of being able to consider a clutch of mature masterpieces. About the music Cairns writes with incomparable vividness, combining comprehension and illumination. I lost count of the number of times that, in the course of reading, I jumped up to the score or CD player to test his aperçus. Paragraphs on Benvenuto Cellini leap off the page with such descriptive fire and vivacity that, in spite of its status (which Cairns admits) as one of the most recalcitrant of problem operas, one craves to see and hear it again.

On the Romeo and Juliet symphony, perhaps Berlioz's most exalted artistic creation, the author both reveals and himself catches Berliozian greatness. Examining this, and Summer Nights, and The Childhood of Christ, and The Trojans, and Beatrice and Benedick, he can make the music meaningful on intellectual and "animal" levels simultaneously - after the manner of his hero, who is one of the tutelary deities of music criticism.

In spite of the peaks of excitement to which this book is capable of inspiring even the most tried-and-tested Berliozian, and the hilarity that its subject provides with his brilliant verbal sallies (the Paris Opéra, he wrote, tended to reduce works performed there to the state of "strawberry beds ravaged by turkeys"), this is one of the saddest of all biographies of great artists.

The main lines of thought that unite both its halves are Berlioz's lifelong struggles to become recognised in French music, and his lifelong awareness that his own gifts - as musical executor as well as composer - would have been sufficient, had they been allowed to flourish, to raise to unimaginable heights the wretchedly corrupt, mediocrity-dominated state of music in his native land.

In Volume One the battle was against, first, parental disapproval of a musical career, then educational conservatism. The later readiness of the Paris musical establishment to block, pigeonhole, or even dismiss as mad a voice of such revolutionary originality was also elucidated, but this becomes the heart-breaking leitmotif of Volume Two.

On those occasions when Berlioz was able to put on Paris concerts of his music - arranging absolutely everything himself, from engaging performers, through coordinating score material, to sending out complimentary tickets - he may have triumphed (at the time of Romeo and Juliet he did so, superbly), but his achievements turned out to be, in Cairns's words, "built on sand... ad hoc achievements, victories won outside the system, at a cost in physical and nervous energy that (wore) him down".

We are never allowed to lose sight of Berlioz's self-destructive side, his "Dauphinois zeal for settling old scores whatever the consequences"; but equally, the integrity of his whole view of music shines out like a beacon. This was admired in those counties - principally Germany and Russia as well as England - where in middle age he began to tour, and where he made career strides and even, at times, money.

But in France he was allowed to be - indeed for most of his life he was accepted as - only a critic. As he once wrote in a letter, "What the devil was the Good Lord thinking of when he had me born in 'this pleasant land of France'?" The practice of musical criticism is the "servitude" to which Cairns's subtitle refers: the need to earn money to keep wife and child, for which musical journalism was the only secure source, and which induced eternal despair at the demand for words when all he wanted to write was musical notes.

That those words have the same extraordinary qualities of imagination, colour, daring and largeness of intellectual conception that stamp his music - and that his Memoirs, for all their factual unreliability, constitute one of the masterpieces of the genre in any language or century - was no consolation. "At last they are going to play my music" was his final death-bed phrase.

Those main themes, and also Berlioz's fraught personal relationships, are outlined and developed in this volume with magisterial authority and richness of detail. Cairns's balanced, fair-minded method of "placing" the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, Berlioz's first wife, and the singer Marie Recio, his second, affords new insights into all the concerned parties - and does so with a freshness of voice that is the author's own.

Mini-essays on relations with Meyerbeer, Liszt, Wagner, and the 19th-century Russian school of composers, on Berlioz's sense of being Gluck's compositional direct descendant, are revelatory; those on the state of "official" music and opera in Paris, and the bribery and corruption that invariably attended both, have a ghoulish fascination.

One needs to have read the first volume (which the Penguin Press are simultaneously re-publishing) before tackling the second. Both volumes properly needed a glossary of the players in this grand and agonising drama. The failure to provide one, and one or two minor niggles (titles of works variously given, without clear reason, in the original languages and in English), detract not at all from Cairns's magnificent achievement.

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