Preface

Summary

Closure – poetic and musical – occupied much of Berlioz's creative energy. The Memoirs, with Postscript and Postface appended to the main text, with Travels in Dauphiné returning us to the scene of the beginning, and with lines from Macbeth recapitulating at the close the epigraph of the opening, bear witness to the man's compelling sense of order and design. The current proliferation of Berlioz scholarship would suggest – now that the œuvres littéraires, the complete works, the complete correspondence, the complete feuilletons and those who are responsible for seeing these monumental editions into print have brought modern Berlioz studies into adulthood; now that Hugh Macdonald, David Cairns and D. Kern Holoman have written biographies in English, the first of significance since the appearance over forty years ago of Jacques Barzun's Berlioz and the Romantic Century – that the moment is ripe for an international gathering of Berlioz Studies, not of course to close them out, but to attempt to lend them a sense of order and design.

Future collections may prefer to use the title figure as the hub of a wheel, and offer as fare to the reader items about music critics in Paris, orchestras in Riga, baritones in Vienna, cellists in Brunswick, duchesses in Weimar and railroads in Central Europe.