Description

Berlioz’s Mémoires were written with humour and Picaresque self-mockery. This distance allowed Berlioz to stand back from himself, as well as his period. As a painter of modern life, he used broad strokes, anecdotes and silhouettes to describe the latter in all its movement and fleeting beauty, as well as its pettiness and disillusionment. Modernity, for Berlioz, took two antithetical forms: when it came to taste, Berlioz championed "modern" art (in other words, Romantic art); but when it came to economics, when modernity involved the industrialisation of art, Berlioz denounced its damaging effects.