and “This book is not a biography in the ordinary sense, and even less strictly a and “musical life. and ” The size of the book implies rather the traditional and “Life and Times, and ” except that here an effort has been made to organize the materials so as to satisfy most economically the interest of different readers. A glance at Volume Two will show that much of it is taken up with Supplements and Bibliographies for professional users. From the rest, the general reader himself need take only so much as meets his wants. He can, so to speak, carve from these pages several different the life of a man who was at once artist, thinker, and doer; a concert or record guide to twelve great works increasingly valued by connoisseurs; an essay on esthetics; an account of nineteenth-century culture; and, I dare say, a tract for our times as well. In the battle of Berlioz with his age a typical story is dramatized by the events themselves. History spins the plot around the Artist, and the four corners of our society are illumined like a stage. For in a high civilization all social facts and forces become the matrix, and sometimes the subject, of the artist’s work; and in the forms and conditions of a collective art like music we find again the elements of familiar history – politics, economics, and the struggles of human groups. To learn a crator’s ways, come to see through his eyes, and discover how past and current achievements affected his gifts in the making of great new work is the business of the historicla critic; to generalize and show by a massive instance how in a given age great work gets accomplished, fought over, and slowly assimilated is the business of the cultural historian. It is as an artisan in both kinds that I have tried to present Berlioz in the century of Romanticism. and ” (from author’s note)

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