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Overview
In 1827 Harriet Smithson, a beautiful and talented young Irish actress, makes an unusual decision. Determined to avoid the traditional route to stardom via the manager’s bed, she joins an English company in the bold experiment of taking Shakespeare to Paris.
With the ferment of revolution in the air, the new generation is longing for a novel kind of passionate, spontaneous art. And to Harriet’s astonishment, it is embodied in her—-La Belle Irlandaise. In the midst of this frenzy she finds herself pursued by a strange, intense young composer named Hector Berlioz. So begins a painful and profound love affair. She is his muse, his idée fixe, his obsession; and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, directly inspired by Harriet, will change music forever.
Symphony is an audacious, brilliant, and haunting novel, set against a background of nineteenth-century theatre, Romantic art, music, and revolutionary Europe. But at its heart lies the story of two lives transfigured and destroyed by genius, inspiration, and madness.
Synopsis
In 1827 Harriet Smithson, a beautiful and talented young Irish actress, makes an unusual decision. Determined to avoid the traditional route to stardom via the manager’s bed, she joins an English company in the bold experiment of taking Shakespeare to Paris.
With the ferment of revolution in the air, the new generation is longing for a novel kind of passionate, spontaneous art. And to Harriet’s astonishment, it is embodied in her—-La Belle Irlandaise. In the midst of this frenzy she finds herself pursued by a strange, intense young composer named Hector Berlioz. So begins a painful and profound love affair. She is his muse, his idée fixe, his obsession; and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, directly inspired by Harriet, will change music forever.
Symphony is an audacious, brilliant, and haunting novel, set against a background of nineteenth-century theatre, Romantic art, music, and revolutionary Europe. But at its heart lies the story of two lives transfigured and destroyed by genius, inspiration, and madness.
The Washington Post - Eugenia Zukerman
[This] tale could make for a torrid romance novel, but the brilliant historical novelist Jude Morgan has turned it into a deeply empathic exploration of obsession and art, genius and madness. The author's narrative flows musically. The text is scored for many voices, the operatic cast is large, and Morgan's ability to bring each character to life is virtuosic…Morgan's historical novel is deliciously romantic yet elegantly restrained. It resembles the musical work that is at its core, not only in its structure—chapters marked "Prelude" through five "Movements" to its "Coda"—but also in its complexity, its wit and insight, its rangy themes and its thrilling momentum.
Editorials
Eugenia Zukerman
[This] tale could make for a torrid romance novel, but the brilliant historical novelist Jude Morgan has turned it into a deeply empathic exploration of obsession and art, genius and madness. The author's narrative flows musically. The text is scored for many voices, the operatic cast is large, and Morgan's ability to bring each character to life is virtuosic…Morgan's historical novel is deliciously romantic yet elegantly restrained. It resembles the musical work that is at its core, not only in its structure—chapters marked "Prelude" through five "Movements" to its "Coda"—but also in its complexity, its wit and insight, its rangy themes and its thrilling momentum.—The Washington Post
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.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationKirkus Reviews
Scenes from the lives of French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz and Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Morgan's latest (Indiscretion, 2006, etc.) is an impressionistic patchwork employing every narrative device from stream of consciousness to interior monologue, complete with an opera libretto and faux-Shakespearean blank verse. The protagonists's alternating stories could be separate novels, so scant is their interaction-Hector and Harriet will not meet until the final third of the book. Hector's sections take him from childhood to life in Paris, where, to the dismay of his physician father and pious provincial mother, he abandons medical studies to pursue his fanciful musical dreams. Harriet progresses from ingenue in her father's theater company to music-hall melodrama in London, then takes roles in Shakespearean plays. Unable to dislodge Covent Garden's venerable leading ladies, she heads for Paris, where, performing as Ophelia at the Odeon, she's an overnight sensation. Her triumph is marred only by that eccentric young composer who pesters her with pleading missives, all of which she rebuffs. Years later, back in Paris for an ill-starred comeback, Harriet hears Hector's Symphonie Fantastique, inspired by her. The twain meet and the attraction is finally mutual. Hector's family disowns him for marrying an actress. Nevertheless, all is bliss-there's a child, Louis, and an impoverished but loving menage in Montmartre. Abruptly, even for a novel as circuitous as this, Harriet turns to partaking liberally of the brandy hidden in her bureau. Her irrational frenzies and tantrums tax Hector and drive him to Germany, where he's well received by more musically astute audiences. Harriet's direprophecies of Hector's betrayal are fulfilled: Hector falls prey to the shrewd, refreshingly ungifted Marie. Harriet is sent to the country to dry out. After several strokes, she becomes an inarticulate and hence more accommodating basket case, and Hector nurses her in her decline. Cameo appearances by Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Dumas and Delacroix, and lush, period-appropriate, at times impenetrable prose make for an unwieldy but credible behind-the-music expose of the Romantic era.From the Publisher
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“Picking up Indiscretion is like being given a favorite assortment of candy . . . you know you’ll love every bit.” —-The Christian Science Monitor