Product Description

An audacious, brilliant and haunting novel about the composer Hector Belioz, by the author of PASSION. In 1827 Harriet Smithson, a beautiful and talented young Irish actress joins an English company taking Shakespeare to Paris. With the ferment of revolution in the air, the new generation is longing for a kind of passionate, spontaneous art. To Harriet's astonishment, it is embodied in her -- La Belle Irlandaise. She finds herself pursued by an intense young composer named Hector Berlioz. So begins a painful and profound love affair. She is his muse; his idee fixe; his obsession. And Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, directly inspired by Harriet, will change music forever. In the course of their marriage, their lives are transfigured and destroyed by genius, inspiration, and ultimately madness. SYMPHONY is set against a background of nineteenth-century theatre, Romantic art and music, revolutionary Europe, inspiration and madness and features Liszt, Delacroix, Dumas, Hugo and Chopin. But at its heart lies the story of a woman who found, almost against her will, that she was a maker of magic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2318911 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The real-life marriage of Irish actress Harriet Smithson (1800–1854) to composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) is the ostensible subject of Morgan's latest (following Indiscretion), but the two don't meet until two thirds of the way into this thickly embellished historical romance. After initial reluctance, the young Harriet, her passion for theatre inflamed by Shakespeare, joins her family's traveling theater company. As drink dissipates her father, weight softens her mother and minimal talent limits her brother Joseph, Harriet takes charge of the family business and appears with theatrical stars of the time. But it's her magnificent interpretation of Ophelia in Paris that brings her a public, including Hector, the son of a successful doctor and a pious mother. Young Hector's path to a musical education is told in parallel to Harriet's youth. After her Ophelia, Harriet turns away Hector's ardent pursuit, but as her theater begins to fail and his musical star begins to rise, she attends a performance of his Symphonie Fantastique, inspired by her. Morgan's modernist style, with frequent shifts in tense and POV, won't be for everyone, but it lets Morgan nicely capture the multiple levels of consciousness a performer juggles on stage (the three minds) and gives the novel real texture. (Dec.)
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Review
"'PASSION is a wonderful book - rich, authentic, beautifully written and, yes, passionate. It tells familiar stories of famous men and women from fresh angles, breathing life into them rather like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein did to his monster. I have not been better entertained all year' Tracy Chevalier; 'It's hard to describe this huge, ambitious historical novel without coming over like a Hollywood film pitch: "the Romantic poets - and the women who loved them'", but in depicting the lives of four women who were romantically involved with Byron, Shelley and Keats, Morgan has pulled off an epic feat both of imagination and of research... Morgan takes us deep into the souls of these extraordinary women, filling us with admiration for their defiance of convention' Marie Claire '[Jude Morgan] handles incredibly complicated political intrigues with great aplomb and [his] characters take on real flesh...A remarkably smooth and satisfying read' Margaret Forster; 'Morgan is careful to challenge the preconceptions of his historical characters... His skill is in bringing to life Jemmy's understandings of the deceitful atmosphere swirling around him' The Times"

Review

Customer Reviews

A fine historical novel fizzles out towards the end
This is a novel about the French composer Hector Berlioz and the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Harriet came with a group of actors to perform Shakespeare in Paris in 1827, and as soon as Berlioz saw her performances, he became obsessed with her, worshipping her from afar: they did not actually meet for another five years, and then they married.

A great deal of research has gone into the book, but it is lightly worn. Berlioz first sees her perform about half way through the book; but in the early part we have a superb account of their lives before that time. Not only the principal characters, but the other members of their families are splendidly realized in the round, as is the social and political background of the time. Morgan also beautifully captures Berlioz' overheated Romantic sensibilities and Harriet's insecurities. His passionate wooing of her and her response are touchingly described, as is the brief period of happiness which follows.

Both had been warned that it was an unsuitable marriage; but who could have told just how it would turn out? The torture that afflicted both their lives makes painful reading.

The style is a little idiosyncratic. Sometimes events are narrated in the historic present, sometimes in the past tense; there are very many short fragments of sentences without a main verb; and I don't think I care for the intrusion at one stage of a libretto Morgan has invented, nor for the few pages of mock-Shakespearean drama that presumably presents itself to an opium-drugged Berlioz near the end. In the last 100 pages or so the power of the book slackens considerably, tragic though its material is. It is almost as if Morgan has himself lost interest. The chronology becomes too loose, and there is an unnecessary section on Mendelssohn. Personally I also think it would have been better to have put the material of the Prologue into the end of the book instead: coming at the beginning, it gives too much away. But the choice of vocabulary is always imaginative without being forced, and from a purely literary point of view, too, about three-quarters of the book is a real pleasure to read.

Somewhat Discordant
The central matter of Jude Morgan's "Symphony" is a romantic, but eventually failed, marriage between Hector Berlioz and actress Harriet Smithson, who was Berlioz' muse and the inspiration for his "Symphonie Fantastique." The tricks that Morgan uses to tell this story include shifts in tone, chronology, point of view, and style - some, although by no means all, of the modern literary arsenal. Unfortunately, in this writer's hands, the various narrative devices that he uses seem rather complicated and "precious." This is one book that would have benefited from less cleverness on the part of its author.

Readers who are interested in the lives of the Romantic composers may also want to check out the fine biography (it reads better than most novels) titled "Chopin's Funeral," by Benita Eisler.

fascinating biographical historical fiction
In 1827 twentyish Irish actress Harriet Smithson believes she can become a star without sleeping with a theatre manager or a play producer. Instead, she takes the radical approach by staying with her family's troupe going to Paris to perform Shakespeare.

In France she takes over running the group as her father sinks deeper into alcoholism, her brother has no talent for the stage or business, and her mother feels her age and her growing waistline. Her performance as Ophelia in Hamlet is the rage of the city leading to acclaim and the demand by the adulating public to see her perform. Composer Hector Berlioz is attracted to Harriet, but she rejects his advances until her fame wanes while his soars especially when he credits her as his muse and the Symphonie Fantastique is performed.

Rotating perspective between the actress and the composer, readers obtain a fascinating biographical historical fiction that is not easy to read due shifting tense, but worth the time as fans obtain a rare deep look inside the mind of a performer while performing. Harriet and Hector come alive on and off stage as Jude Morgan provides a virtuoso performance with the entertaining SYMPHONY.

Harriet Klausner