Berlioz memorably frames his Memoirs with two versions of the same quotation, one in French, one in English: the grim passage from Macbeth dismissing life as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Despite the announced gloom, readers of the Memoirs soon discover that this particular tale of sound and fury—told, to be sure, not by an idiot but a master storyteller—is balanced by frequent patches of light and a constant leavening of humor. The gloom of the epigraph coincides not so much with the book as with its preface. So well does the epigraph match the preface, indeed, and so lastingly did Shakespeare haunt Berlioz’s imagination, that the passage from Macbeth is likely to have been present in his mind, if not on paper, from the start.

In the preface, that start is identified with a precise date and place: London, 21 March 1848, barely a month after the revolution that had ousted King Louis-Philippe and established the Second French Republic. Refugees, among them many artists, were flocking to England—the image in the preface is of seabirds coming to shore before a storm—where Berlioz had preceded them by several months. It was as though political events were amplifying his private exile, the year before, when he had left Paris to recoup the financial disaster of his Damnation de Faust. That had been a life-changing blow. Until then Berlioz had trusted the French concert public, on the whole—the public that had acclaimed his works faithfully, even when government taxes drained his profits and the musical establishment continued to rebuff or even sabotage him. But when “his” public did not turn out for La Damnation, in December 1846, it hit him like a betrayal— an et tu, Brute. It also sealed his disenchantment with democratic regimes. If a constitutional monarchy was ineffectual in providing for music, as he rather unfairly concluded, what chance would there be under an even more extreme form of democracy, a republic?

Thus the Memoirs were begun in response to a crisis, according to a reflex that had become habitual: writing, during the previous two decades, had been his one dependable source of income.