Jacques Barzun’s Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950): A Musicological Brontosaurus?

Jacques Barzun’s landmark biography Berlioz and the Romantic Century, (1950) identified a perceived problem in previous scholarship on Berlioz. Barzun held that authors from Adolphe Boschot to J.-G. Prod’homme had misrepresented (and sometimes even attempted to debunk) the composer, while not succeeding in addressing his music satisfactorily. Barzun’s biography constituted a reassessment not just of the subject himself, but also of the wider concept of Romanticism, which he believed had come to be narrowed to a stereotypical view of the nineteenth century and its associated artists. The book’s publication subsequently gave rise to factions in the musicological communities of the United States and the United Kingdom, and presented serious doubts about the supposedly sad state of musicology in mid-twentieth-century America.