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Introduction
When Ernest Newman died in 1959 he went to the grave with unfinished business. Among the many books he planned to write, but for which he never found the time - or a willing publisher - were a history of music (in three volumes), a study of Parsifal and a biography of Berlioz.1Work on the history of music never commenced, while the idea for the book on Parsifal languished because Newman decided to take up this project towards the end of his life, but then was far too ill to work on it. Although a Berlioz biography had been in the back of Newman's mind for decades, it too was never written; however, an early draft of one of the proposed chapters, 'The Prose of Berlioz', was published in the June 1899 volume of Chord.
'The Prose of Berlioz', which was not included in Peter Heyworth's anthology of Newman's essays on Berlioz,2and is discussed here for the first time, is a significant work today for three reasons. First, 'The Prose of Berlioz' is the only work on a musical topic by any writer that I have identified as drawing on the work of the French critic and theorist, Emile Hennequin. Second, the history of the genesis of the 'The Prose of Berlioz' reveals much about Newman's early writing career. This background uncovers the many projects that Newman and his publisher chose to abandon for economic and intellectual reasons, demonstrating some of the difficulties Newman faced in establishing himself as a biographer and critic in his formative years, the 1890s, a period of his life that has only recently been studied in detail. 3Third, the Berlioz article is an ideal case for a study of the history of musical biography in the late nineteenth century, because it illustrates the significant degree to which some authors crossed disciplinary boundaries in writing.
The present article explores the alleged influence of Hennequin's theories - particularly an essay by him on Flaubert - on 'The Prose of Berlioz'. I argue that Newman's claim that Hennequin was his sole inspiration is not true, that his methodology in 'The Prose of Berlioz' was derived from a number of...