Berlioz is the perfect subject for the ultimate purpose of this essay. That purpose is to ascertain the essence of music as an art and the proper way to discuss it. That there should be at this late date a need to find this out is implied in the phrasing of my title. The search for it requires that a number of prevailing ideas about music be examined and compared with those taken for granted about the other arts.

As a first example, take the recent history of Berlioz’s fame. The celebration of the two hundredth anniversary in 2003 marked a turning point. He was restored to the place among the master musicians that he held in his lifetime. The conferences and concerts, the publications and reviews of that year were based on half a century of studies by musicologists, conductors, and critics. A good many listeners had been prepared during that same span by excellent recordings of nearly all the works, notably the series conducted by Sir Colin Davis. A comprehensive summary of facts and interpretations in the bulky Dictionnaire Berlioz enshrined the achievement and showed—wonder of wonders— that at last a group of French musicians and scholars had contributed to the evidence for revision. By a happy coincidence, the near-final volume of the New Berlioz Edition, also an international collaboration, appeared in that same year.

The point of this resume is this: What put Berlioz in his due place was the proof that his handling of melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, and instrumentation was original and coherent. The myth of the ill-trained bungler with wild ideas and haphazard strokes of genius was no longer tenable. And a closer reading of his life as conductor and critic added support to the conclusion that he possessed not only genius but cool and conscious mastery of his craft. In short: “Pupil Berlioz, you have done well.”

The further conclusion is that the art of music consists in the quality of the musical technique. This is the common unspoken assumption. It underlies what musicologists, biographers, and scholarly critics think is the point of their task first and last. When one doubts this identity as I do, one sees that it conceals not one but several unacceptable beliefs.