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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2013
Ernest Newman (1868–1959) first proposed a biography of Berlioz in the 1890s. A schedule for its research and writing was hatched, an agreement was made with a publisher for its manufacture, and Newman promptly set to work on the project. Alas, like so many other book projects Newman commenced in the 1890s, the Berlioz biography was never completed. Even though sketches or drafts of the book do not survive, there is plenty of evidence of the methodology and structure that Newman proposed for the book, for a work-in-progress article, ‘The prose of Berlioz,’ was published in the Chord in June 1899. It is a remarkable essay for its engagement with Berlioz's prose works and for its theorizing on musical biography. I illustrate that Newman's biographical method was partly inspired by the work of Emile Hennequin (1858–93), and was an approach that Newman had previously used in some of his literary criticism. However, I argue that despite Newman's claim of Hennequin's influence, the article's wider influence came from a larger pool of writers working on style theory, including Walter Pater, Walter Raleigh and J.A. Symonds.
This article grew out of a presentation entitled ‘Ernest Newman's plans for a Berlioz biography in the 1890s’, delivered at the fifth biannual conference on nineteenth-century British music held at the University of Birmingham, 5–8 July 2007. Research for the article was completed in June–July 2009 while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Musical Research, University of London, funded by a Monash University Travel Grant. I am very grateful to the anonymous assessor of this article for comments that improved the final version.
1 Plans for the history of music, which appear to have been first raised in 1921, are recorded in Vera Newman's Ernest Newman: A Memoir by his Wife (London, 1963), 25.
Mention is made of Newman's planned Parsifal book on p. 269 of the book. It is well known that Newman had planned to write a Berlioz biography; see, for example, Berlioz, Romantic and Classic, ed. Peter Heyworth (London, 1972), 11: ‘He [Newman] did in fact intend to write a full-length study of Berlioz's music. That even in the last years of his life he had not abandoned this project is clear from the fact that he allowed no articles on Berlioz to be included in the two anthologies of his writings in the Sunday Times, which appeared near the end of his life …’.
2 Heyworth, Berlioz, Romantic and Classic.
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