The future is his …

… David Cairns explains how we learned to love Berlioz | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The future fascinated him as much as the past (the great writers of the grand siècle, Molière, Racine, Corneille, Boileau, the 18th-century composers of opéra-comique like Grétry and Dalayrac). One of his last newspaper articles, under the guise of reviewing the latest ephemeral opera, predicts air travel and imagines how it will be used to collect the musicians that, as a conductor, he needs.

Here is my review of David Cairns's splendid biography of Berlioz.