A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner-s estimation, he hovered as a -transient, marvelous exception,- a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who -does not belong in our musical solar system,- the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange-and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre and form, and too difficult to analyze. He was, in many ways, a composer without a world. Berlioz and His World takes a deep dive into the composer-s complex legacy, tracing lines between his musical and literary output and the scientific, sociological, technological, and political influences that shaped him. Compr
