Bibliographic Information

Evenings with the orchestra

Hector Berlioz ; translated and edited with an introduction and notes by Jacques Barzun ; with a new foreword by Peter Bloom

University of Chicago Press, c1999

Other Title

Soirées de l'orchestre

Available at  / 3 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Originally published: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1973

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

During the performances of fashionable operas in an unidentified but "civilized" town in northern Europe, the musicians (with the exception of the conscientious bass drummer) tell tales, read stories, and exchange gossip to relieve the tedium of the bad music they are paid to perform. In this delightful and now classic narrative written by the brilliant composer and critic Hector Berlioz, we are privy to twenty-five highly entertaining evenings with a fascinating group of distracted performers. As we near the two-hundredth anniversary of Berlioz's birth, Jacques Barzun's pitch-perfect translation of Evenings with the Orchestra --with a new foreword by Berlioz scholar Peter Bloom--testifies to the enduring pleasure found in this most witty and amusing book. "[F]ull of knowledge, penetration, good sense, individual wit, stock humor, justifiable exasperation, understanding exaggeration, emotion and rhetoric of every kind." --Randall Jarrell, New York Times Book Review "To succeed in [writing these tales], as Berlioz most brilliantly does, requires a combination of qualities which is very rare, the many-faceted curiosity of the dramatist with the aggressively personal vision of the lyric poet."--W. H. Auden, The Griffin

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

Page Top