I begin by describing how I came to choose this subject and to jot down points, which turned out to number fourteen—you may well think of a few more. I was leafing through a thick up-to-date guide to recordings and my eye fell on the entry for the Symphonie fantastique. I learned there that it was “by that wayward composer Berlioz.” I leafed through further but failed to find the Bruckner Sixth as being “by that neurotic composer”—you know how he used go obsessively to the morgue in Vienna to look at corpses. Nor was Siegfried Idyll “by that insolvent and adulterous composer Richard Wagner.”

In short, Berlioz is still given special treatment. That is my Point One, recently confirmed by the London Daily Telegraph. A splendid half-page article by our incomparable David Cairns about Colin Davis’s Berlioz concerts at the Barbican was given a headline that refers to “the Maverick Frenchman’s Music.” What is to be noted is that the labeling is automatic, traditional, absent-minded, and it is usually contrary to fact. So far from being wayward, Berlioz steered an uncommonly straight course in his musical conceiving and composing. Read his earliest critiques or listen to his earliest cantatas for the Rome Prize and you find his mature work clearly prefigured. There are in his life no “periods,” no mid-career Revelation causing a change of style.

What then contributes to the persistent use of epithets dating from his lifetime? Tags, mostly unfriendly, are stuck on every artist when his vision is new, but once he is dead enough to cease being a threat, every journalist devises a couple of complimentary clichés that show his insight, scholarship, and taste. This turnaround is standard even for the most minor talents, and quite properly so; it is part of the informative role of the newspaper reviewer, the writer of program notes, and the compiler of guidebooks. Musicologists and academics pass more complex judgments, mixing praise and criticism, but they take pains to argue their points of disapproval, which others can argue against. This debate goes on in the secrecy of learned journals and does not affect the public’s ready-made and favorable opinions.