Berlioz

Praise for Berlioz, Volume I:

"We now have a biography that not only takes in the immense documentation of Berlioz's early life but goes far beyond it in piecing together an incomparably rich portrait of the man and his milieu. . . . The picture is so vivid and the prose so magnetic that not a word seems wasted. . . . Cairns's biography of Berlioz must take its place with the handful of great lives of composers, such as Thayer's Beethoven, Newman's Wagner, and Walker's Wolf."--Hugh MacDonald, The Listener

"Even at this halfway stage, [Cairns's] Berlioz stands as one of the great biographies of our day, and also one of the great feats of literary sympathy with an artistic genius, filled with a love, knowledge, and understanding of his subject that flame up on every page."--Max Loppert, Financial Times

"This biography is kindled by sympathy and enthusiasm for its subject, and is written with a lifelong professional experience of Berlioz behind it. It is also beautifully and interestingly written. The chapters flow together like Berlioz's own harmonic changes, and with equal resonance."--Roger Norrington, Independent

David Cairns was chief music critic of the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1992, having earlier been music critic and arts editor of the Spectator and a writer for the Financial Times and the New Statesman. From 1967 to 1972 he worked for the London branch of Phonogram. He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Center in Santa Monica.