A thumbnail sketch like the present is, of course, the last place in the
world to recount even an infinitesimal part of a life so vivid and
crowded with bitter conflict and tragic experience as that of Hector
Berlioz; and the person who attempts it is beaten in advance. Moreover,
such an effort seems almost gratuitous. For Berlioz has told his own
story better than anyone else could possibly do it. When Ernest Newman
was asked at one time to write a new biography of the epoch-making
composer he informed the publisher who suggested it that “no Life by any
other hands will ever be able to bear comparison as a piece of
literature with Berlioz’ Autobiography. All others are for the most part
a watering down into the author’s inferior style of the sparkling prose
of Berlioz himself”. How much more futile is it to attempt on the
minuscule scale of the following tiny, if rambling, pamphlet to touch
upon even a thousandth of those achievements and unremitting conflicts
which entered into the texture of this master’s agitated and
inharmonious life! Actually, it aims to do no more than contribute a
mite toward a larger interest in the writings and the great mass of
insufficiently discovered compositions of a Romanticist whose labors are
still surprisingly unrecognized art works of the future.