It was the Memoirs, in the Everyman translation by Katharine Boult, together with the 78-rpm black-label recording by Jean Planel of Le Repos de la Sainte Famille, that first kindled my interest in the composer, after a predominantly Germanic musical upbringing which left no room for Berlioz, indeed made his music incomprehensible to me.

After that my education progressed rapidly. These were the years of Les Troyens at Covent Garden (1957, 1958, 1960)—the event which, with Jacques Barzun’s equally epoch-making Berlioz and the Romantic Century, transformed Berlioz’s fortunes and reputation—and of the annual performances by the Chelsea Opera Group, of which I was a founder-member and for which I wrote the program notes and played in the percussion section. I learned La Damnation de Faust, Roméo et Juliette, Les Troyens, and Benvenuto Cellini from the inside and, in doing so, discovered a composer rather different from the view of him still common among those who professed to know about such things. To put matters right and restore amends became the ruling passion of a group of young British musicians and writers, of whom I was one. In particular, our energies were devoted to getting Les Troyens published and recorded. Both aims were achieved in 1969, the centenary of the composer’s death, when the New Berlioz Edition issued the opera in full score, edited by Hugh Macdonald, and Phonogram, using the new material, recorded the work under Colin Davis.

Berlioz’s autobiography had commonly been regarded with a comparable skepticism. The more I worked on it the more I realized that here too was an attitude that cried out for correction. After it had first appeared, in 1870, the book, christened by Charles Villiers Stanford “Berlioz’s masterly work (? of fiction),” was ready prey for commentators bent on proving its author at best a fantasist and at worst a liar.