 David
Cairns was music critic of the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1992, having
previously written for the Spectator, the Financial Times and the New Statesman.
From 1967 to 1972 he worked as classical programme co-ordinator for Philips
Records and was involved in some of the company's major recording projects,
including operas by Mozart (Idomeneo, Le Nozze di Figaro), Berlioz (Benvenuto
Cellini, The Trojans), and Tippett (The Midsummer Marriage).
He has always been actively
involved in music making: he was co founder of the Chelsea Opera Group,
in 1950, and sang solo roles under the group's first conductor, Colin Davis;
he is conductor of the Thorington Players, an amateur orchestra which gives
regular concerts for charity.
He has written several books,
including a prize winner 2-volume biography of Berlioz. Volume 1: The Making
of an Artist 1803- 1832, won the Royal Philharmonic Society's Music Award,
the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year and the British Academy's Derek Allen
Prize. It is available in hardback(Allen Lane, £25) and paperback
(Penguin, £12.99). Volume 2: Servitude and Greatness 1832-1869, won
the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, the Whitbread Biography of the
Year and the Royal Philharmonic Society's Music Award. It is available
in hardback (Allen Lane, £25) and paperback (Penguin, £12.99).
Quotations from reviews of
the two books.
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"One of the most insightful
accounts we have of the making of a composer - and one of the most beautifully
written...Indeed, in its investigation of character, its leisurely encompassing
of a mass of social and historical detail, it reads less like a work of
dry musicology than an early nineteenth-century French novel" Bryan
Northcott, BBC Music magazine
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"Utterly captivating...The
drama of Berlioz's life makes him a rewarding subject for a biographer,
and Mr. Cairns rises confidently to the challenge...the research is as
deep as the best historian's, and the description of music is...as convincing
as the best musicologist's" Economist
-
"In David Cairns, Berlioz
has found a biographer who shares his sense of scale. There is not a dull
or redundant page in the whole book. Mr. Cairns has lived, breathed and
dreamt Berlioz for more than twenty years. He has visited the places Berlioz
visited and read the books Berlioz read" Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph
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"One of the finest of all
biographies of a composer...the sweep of the narrative and its setting
against a background of nineteenth-century French musical and political
life is breathtaking. Above all, Berlioz himself emerges as a larger-that-life
but intensely human personality" Michael
Kennedy. Opera
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"Berlioz's fraught personal
relationships are outlined and developed with magisterial authority and
richness of detail...a magnificent achievement" Max Loppert, Guardian
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