While it was critics who wrote not none too favourably about Berlioz’s innovative symphony, his work was also noticed by composers, two of whom also wrote symphonies they called ‘fantastic’. Berlioz himself reacted to his own work by producing its sequel (Lélio, or the Return to Life); the protagonist wakes from his nightmare and, eventually, determines to return to his art. Other composers who responded in diverse ways included Franz Liszt, who transcribed the symphony for piano – the form in which it was first published – and Robert Schumann, whose essay is considered in Chapter 10. Later composers took up the challenges posed by the symphony, connecting movements by recurring themes, following the lead of Beethoven and Berlioz by adding instruments to the ‘classical’ orchestra, and composing music of demonic character, some of it using the Dies irae itself.

Returning to the cultural context in which Berlioz conceived his work, other angles of approach to the music, the programme, and the sequel have become a focus of recent approaches to Symphonie fantastique. Some recent overviews appear in biographies of Berlioz, all of which necessarily return to his own Memoirs when relating his music to his personality and life experiences. Scientific developments interested him and may have had an effect on his music, as did his study of instruments, old and new, later expounded in a treatise. Writers have reviewed aspects of the supernatural within the ‘fantastic’ and the importance of the symphony in the development of programmatic instrumental music (related to something outside itself, biographical, literary, or visual). Symphonie fantastique, while it should not overshadow Berlioz’s other works for the concert hall or the stage, remains the critical turning point in his development.

This chapter details the history of Messiaen’s family. It examines Messiaen’s relationships with his parents, Pierre Messiaen and Cécile Sauvage, his two wives, Claire Delbos and Yvonne Loriod, and his son Pascal. It reveals that Messiaen’s private life was complex and sometimes difficult, but also that these relationships had a profound effect on his understanding of himself as a composer, his compositions, and the performance of his music.

Erwartung was not performed until fifteen years after its feverishly speedy composition. By its very nature, it has not become a regular feature of the operatic repertory, yet its importance is not merely that of an interesting object for musicological study. The dramatic force and lyrical eloquence of its music has been widely acknowledged – a compelling and not unsympathetic psychological study of derangement to be placed alongside more traditionally operatic precedents as Strauss’s Salome. Most published commentaries on it have dealt with compositional materials and techniques, and consideration of a range of such studies focuses on what can be reconstructed about the evolution of the text, as well as the various attempts to find consistency and coherence in the thirty-minute score. By and large, a consensus has evolved, especially through the use of post-tonal analytical techniques, which counterbalances the assumption that the score is a repetition-free ‘stream of consciousness’.

Race has always been a central issue in discussions of jazz. A history of the representation of jazz in the American cinema is, in many ways, a history of the representation of African Americans, including their struggle to overcome oppression from whites. But as the title of this paper suggests, jazz is one of several aspects of American culture which has delighted white people and inspired them to appropriate– or to steal– the music of Black people. Many of the early jazz films were built around the white swing orchestras and their followers. In the 1940s and 1950s, biopics told the stories of white jazz artists. Biopics of black artists appeared in the 1960s and later. More recently, jazz has been celebrated as an art that allows musicians and audiences to ascend to a higher plane.

The Introduction appraises recent trends in Schumann scholarship and reception, evaluating perceptions about Schumann’s instrumental music and the Piano Concerto’s place within them. It locates the Concerto within the critical tendency, prevalent since the early twentieth century, to style Schumann’s large-scale instrumental compositions as deficient in comparison with the piano cycles of the 1830s and the songs of 1840, evidencing the inadaptability of Schumann’s style to classical forms. Noting that the Piano Concerto has consistently evaded this criticism, I argue that the work should be understood as a landmark in the development of what John Daverio called Schumann’s ‘system of genres’: it marks the point at which Schumann’s evolving engagement with the genre comes to fruition, and makes possible his subsequent experiments with concerto form.

Messiaen’s music is rhythmically and harmonically complex. It reflects, as he affirmed, the miraculous beauty of God’s Creation. By the early 1940s, he had developed a musical language of religious symbolism comprising a variety of components. The building blocks on which this language is based and the contents their inventor intended them to represent were clearly defined, and hardly changed in the course of the composer’s long life. This article gives an overview of this symbolism and discusses the prevalent devices Messiaen used, along with the religious concepts informing each of them.