Berlioz, who believed his first obligation in life was to compose music and his second was to perform it, wrote six books. Bitterly though he resented his long years’ work as a critic, he was a brilliant writer, acknowledged in his own time and ever since as the wielder of a lively pen, sharp, witty, well informed and passionate. Among the great composers of his day a number had secondary callings as writers, notably Schumann and Wagner. Berlioz’s writings are much more extensive than Schumann’s, much more readable than Wagner’s, and much funnier than both.

The Musical Madhouse, published in 1859 as Les Grotesques de la musique, was Berlioz’s fourth book, with a deliberate tone of levity, as reflected in its title. It was preceded by a two-volume book of autobiography (the Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie of 1844), the Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes of the same year, and Les Soirées de l’orchestre (“Evenings with the Orchestra”) of 1852. Still to come were A travers chants in 1862 (the title is untranslatable: an early English version was entitled “Mid Realms of Song”, while the most recent is simply called “The Art of Music”) and the celebrated Memoirs, which, though compiled over many years, were not issued until 1870, after Berlioz’s death. The orchestration treatise and the Memoirs have been widely read and translated into many languages; Les Soirées de l’orchestre and A travers chants, compiled from articles published in the Parisian press, have each been translated twice into English, while the similar compilation Les Grotesques de la musique has remained untranslated until now.

This oversight has no doubt come about because humorous writing is notoriously difficult to translate and because the other books appear, at least, to take on weightier concerns such as Berlioz’s views on opera, on Gluck, on Beethoven, and so forth. As readers of the present volume will discover, Berlioz switches abruptly from telling teasing tales about musicians of his time to profound reflections on the nature of his art; indeed the two are entwined, since music is both an exalted expression of the spirit and an untidy element of everyday life.