A steady stream of excellent work has followed Berlioz's bicentenary in 2003, with a new collection of essays or a monograph appearing most years, while the important editorial projects, including the New Berlioz Edition, the Correspondance générale and (imminently) the Critique musicale have reached their conclusion.Footnote ¹ In just the last two years, we have seen the publication of a Berlioz Encyclopedia and Dictionnaire Berlioz, as well as an update to the catalogue of works and (at last) a critical edition of the Mémoires.Footnote ² With such riches finally in hand, one might be tempted to think that the major work of Berlioz scholarship is nearing completion, but this latest volume makes a strong case that we are only just beginning a new phase (p. 235). Tied to the less-celebrated sesquicentennial of Berlioz's death in 2019, editors Alban Ramaut and Emmanuel Reibel have collected a group of 17 chapters in French, originally given as papers at the Berlioz Festival 2019 in La Côte-Sainte-André. With most chapters about a dozen pages (and a few only half as long) the contributions are necessarily modest in scope, yet the book's careful thematic focus helps provide greater coherence than sometimes occurs in conference proceedings, and the essays here gain strength from the context in which they are presented.

As the title – Hector Berlioz 1869–2019: 150 Years of Passions – suggests, the focus is on Berlioz reception after the composer's death, an underexplored avenue for which this collection will now form an essential starting point. The frontmatter sets the celebratory tone with a thumbnail-sized Avant-propos from John Eliot Gardner, happily recounting Berlioz's progress among performers and audiences, as well as a préface toasting the Berlioz community from festival organizer Bruno Messina. Ramaut's brief introduction resists the usual urge to summarize every article or part (this volume is organized in three parts), instead offering a concise introduction to the history of Berlioz reception, including some intriguing threads not touched upon in the volume. As he explains,

In addition to his own essay, Ramaut also contributes a poetic epilogue, which lingers on the themes of death and legacy. Short, unsigned introductions to each part helpfully situate and synthesize what follows. In my review, I will briefly summarize the aims of each part before turning to its individual essays, which, due to their large number and my limited space, cannot be treated in as much detail as they deserve.

Part I, ‘The “Figure” Berlioz: Historicity, Canon, Ideology’, is the most tightly integrated section and offers a broad overview of his posthumous reception in France. The seven well-chosen case studies address Berlioz's fortunes during different political moments and through different sets of historical documents, including archival, literary and geographical. Part I's scrutiny of the role played by historiography in constructing the Berlioz we know today (or have known at different times) is especially welcome in an anniversary volume, and the authors and editors might have pushed this theme further to reflect more on the role of Berlioz scholars in the present. As Hanae Tsukada outlines in ‘Berlioz and Historiography Under the Third Republic: Nationalism, Republicanism and (Anti-) Wagnerism’, Berlioz became a key figure in the writing of nationalist French music history meant to counter German hegemony in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. She adds detail to our understanding of this trend by introducing the work of the French musicologists Henri Lavoix, Alfred Bruneau and Jules Combarieu, who were all active during the early twentieth century, when the discipline of musicology was establishing itself in France.

Yannick Simon (‘A French Composer who is “Three Quarters German” under the Occupation’) offers a perfect counterpoint, showing how Berlioz was figured as a symbol of Franco-German collaboration and cooperation during World War II. Especially in his Damnation de Faust, which was used to reopen the Opéra under occupation and programmed frequently thereafter, Berlioz's music was appropriated to serve a Nazi vision of French debts to German culture. Urging nuance in understanding this period, Simon reminds us that, ‘in reality, the “Berlioz question” is just as much aesthetic as political and cannot be reduced to a confrontation between two antagonists or between collaborators and resisters’ (p. 63). More broadly, Emmanuel Reibel (‘The Figure of Berlioz Between Fiction and Reality’) reminds us that historians themselves have been mythmakers, often perpetuating stereotypes from the Mémoires or from ill-informed early critics. He also makes an intriguing case for the role of musicology as a discipline in this process, explaining that, ‘perhaps haunted by the precision and exactitude of their documentation, at the moment when musicology constructed itself in France according to the paradigm of history, biographers sought simultaneously to produce an effect of life’, demonstrating an ‘ambivalence between historical accuracy and romantic effects’ (p. 80).

While the essays mentioned so far focus on intellectual and political histories of Berlioz, Part I also gives attention to the material histories of Berlioz in essays by Cécile Reynaud and Alban Ramaut. In Reynaud's essay, we meet ‘The Collector Charles Malherbe, Arbiter of Berlioz Reception’, whose important collection she manages to largely reconstruct from other holdings at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. As she reminds us, proximity to physical materials played an important role in shaping Berlioz debates around the turn of the twentieth century, seen especially in the debates between Malherbes and Julien Tiersot. Ramaut's essay on ‘The Livre d'or of Hector Berlioz's Centenary and its Controversies’ reflects on what it means to produce an anniversary book, even one with, as he puts it, ‘deceiving mediocrity’ (p. 48), which is to say that many of its most interesting historiographical insights are not immediately apparent. In an appendix, Ramaut provides two brief primary sources, the first an excerpt of an essay by Tiersot that was included in the Livre d'Or and the second a passage of a reprinted article that was suppressed in the Livre d'Or, demonstrating the work's selective editing.

Finally, Jacek Blaszkiewicz and Matthieu Cailliez introduce the idea of ‘Berlioz as Monument: Geography, Commemoration and Canonicity’, using Google's Ngram viewer to track textual mentions of the composer since 1800 in the Google Books corpus (divided by different languages) and Google Maps to track toponymic memorialization. They offer a valuable way to assess longue durée trends in Berlioz's reception (outlined in a number of colour charts), along with nuggets of trivia, like the fact that Berlioz is the fourth most popular classical composer for school names in France (p. 95).

Part II, ‘In the Wake of Berlioz's Oeuvre’, offers a more eclectic set of case studies, touching on Berlioz's literary output, reception in different countries, and reception of specific works, particularly in the recent past. Anastasiia Syreishchikova-Horn follows Berlioz's fortunes in Russia since 1869 (‘Berlioz's Posterity in Russia and the Soviet Union’), highlighting the endurance of a special relationship as well as changing ideological investments (particularly under the Soviets). She brings this study up to the present by noting the frequency of Berlioz performances in Russia today (especially as championed by Valery Gergiev) as well as the challenges of disseminating newer Berlioz scholarship across language barriers. Olivier Class offers a survey from the perspective of France (‘Berlioz's Presence and Reception in French composition [création française] since 1950’), here with a special focus on the aesthetic and technical debts incurred by twentieth- and twenty-first-century French composers. He covers major names like Messiaen and Boulez, as well as a broad range of lesser-known figures, such as Jean-Claude Risset, Philippe Manoury, François-Bernard Mâche and Michaël Levinas. This is the only chapter to focus specifically on musical detail, and Class gives several musical examples as well as making an intriguing case for Berlioz's timbral focus as an important influence on spectralism.

Céline Carenco's ‘Avatars of the Symphonie Fantastique, from Orchestra to Piano’ reminds us of the importance of Liszt's fiendishly difficult transcription for the dissemination of Berlioz's most famous work. Carenco documents the work's reception with a data set of performances of the orchestral and piano versions from 1830 to 2018 (based on Parisian press reports), incorporating and extending previous scholarship on the Symphonie's reception.

The final essays of this part form a valuable thread analysing opera production, a topic of growing interest for musicologists. Claire Paolacci explores ‘Hector Berlioz and the Paris Opera 1869–2019: From Rejection to Consecration’, providing a useful summary of key productions, including Stéphane Lissner's 2010s Berlioz cycle, as well as several charts that account for all Berlioz productions at the Opéra since 1869. In addition to familiar stage works, she also addresses newly created ballets that draw wholly or in part on Berlioz's music, as well as Berlioz's role in the iconic Défilé du ballet de l'Opéra, a ceremonial parading of the ballet troupe that, since 1945, has been accompanied by Berlioz's ‘March of the Trojans’. The music critic Pierre-René Serna offers a more personal and impressionistic account of opera-going (‘Berlioz Staged, or Thirty Years of Experience as a Spectator’), which sketches out some of the national trends in Berlioz operatic activity in recent decades. He also explores the issue of how different versions and editions of Berlioz's operas have impacted production choices. Finally, Michela Niccolai offers a brief introduction to ‘The Trojans in Space (La Fura dels Baus, Valencia, 2009)’, a production by the famed Catalan avant-garde theatre collective La Fura dels Baus. In addition to science fiction tropes (the Trojans are space invaders whose “Trojan Horse” is a computer virus), the work has a focus on ecology that resonates with an important production of Wagner's Ring, previously developed by the same theatre collective.

In several essays across the second and third parts, authors introduce their recent larger works on Berlioz. Though all the books under discussion have printed introductions, the medium of a conference presentation seems to have allowed the authors a greater freedom to broaden their reflections, giving us more insight into the context of their publications. Peter Bloom, who has recently edited a critical edition of Berlioz's Mémoires, offers a witty reflection on how well (or poorly) this infamous work was understood in nineteenth-century France (‘The Mémoires of Hector Berlioz Confronted by their Readers’).Footnote ⁴ As he suggests, common tropes of Berlioz reception were frequently referenced by other French artists, yet they more rarely made comments that suggest a direct and deep knowledge of the Mémoires.

Katherine Kolb (‘Berlioz in English: Contexts and Perspectives’), offers a pre-history to her recent English-language anthology of Berlioz criticism by recounting the work of her predecessors in this field.Footnote ⁵ She points out that Berlioz's most important biographers in English have also been his most important translators. Kolb's death in late 2019 brings special poignancy to this essay, which shows a deep appreciation for the pioneers of anglophone Berlioz scholarship and sketches out the trajectory of this literature into the present. Finally, D. Kern Holoman offers an introduction to the 2018 revised Catalogue of the of New Berlioz Edition (‘New Documents for the Study of Berliozian Sources: The Second Edition of the Berlioz Catalogue’), including a collation of added and updated entries that provides a valuable summary of recent advances in our knowledge.Footnote ⁶ The catalogue is now online and open access, a development that is especially helpful under the current challenges of Covid-19 and which will also allow for regular updates in the future.

Part III, ‘Updates in Berlioz Research Since 2003’ provides reference material that will be most useful to Berlioz specialists and libraries. In addition to the Holoman chapter detailed above, Élizabeth Giuliani gives a 2019 update to her 2003 discography of Berlioz (‘Berliozian Phonography 1901–2019: The Construction of a Sonic Patrimony’). Beyond the recordings themselves, Giuliani also tracks works and interpreters to help understand broader trends in the recorded aspect of Berlioz reception. Her careful work navigates the fragmentation of recording in recent decades (changing platforms of distribution, constant reissues, etc.) and supplies 20 pages of data. Gunther Braam offers ‘Updates to the Berliozian Iconography (2003–2019)’. With four new entries and 20 pages of updates to existing entries, this will be an essential supplement for anyone working with the Iconography volume of the New Berlioz Edition.

In lieu of a bibliography of sources cited across this volume (all of which can be found in the footnotes to individual essays), the editors have provided a comprehensive bibliography of Berlioz publications since 2003. As an anglophone reader, I especially appreciated the breadth of coverage in different languages, whose publications are more easily missed. The quantity and quality of the work presented here is also a testament to the continuing vibrancy of Berlioz studies. The last research item is a ‘Small Anecdotal and Berliozian Chronology 1868–2019’, which supplements the useful Calendrier Berlioz with coverage from the composer's death to the present.Footnote ⁷ In addition to black and white figures and illustrations generously distributed throughout, there are also 26 pages of colour plates. This book is recommended for all Berliozians who wish to stay up to date with the latest developments in the field.