Symphony

Format:	Paperback 480 pages

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Synopsis

An audacious, brilliant and haunting novel about the composer Hector Belioz, by the author of PASSION. In 1827 Harriet Smithson, a beautiful and talented young Irish actress joins an English company taking Shakespeare to Paris. With the ferment of revolution in the air, the new generation is longing for a kind of passionate, spontaneous art. To Harriet's astonishment, it is embodied in her -- La Belle Irlandaise. She finds herself pursued by an intense young composer named Hector Berlioz. So begins a painful and profound love affair. She is his muse; his idee fixe; his obsession. And Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, directly inspired by Harriet, will change music forever. In the course of their marriage, their lives are transfigured and destroyed by genius, inspiration, and ultimately madness. SYMPHONY is set against a background of nineteenth-century theatre, Romantic art and music, revolutionary Europe, inspiration and madness and features Liszt, Delacroix, Dumas, Hugo and Chopin. But at its heart lies the story of a woman who found, almost against her will, that she was a maker of magic.

Book details

Published
05/02/2007

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Headline Review

ISBN
9780755327737

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Jacket review

"'PASSION is a wonderful book - rich, authentic, beautifully written and, yes, passionate. It tells familiar stories of famous men and women from fresh angles, breathing life into them rather like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein did to his monster. I have not been better entertained all year' Tracy Chevalier; 'It's hard to describe this huge, ambitious historical novel without coming over like a Hollywood film pitch: "the Romantic poets - and the women who loved them'", but in depicting the lives of four women who were romantically involved with Byron, Shelley and Keats, Morgan has pulled off an epic feat both of imagination and of research... Morgan takes us deep into the souls of these extraordinary women, filling us with admiration for their defiance of convention' Marie Claire '[Jude Morgan] handles incredibly complicated political intrigues with great aplomb and [his] characters take on real flesh...A remarkably smooth and satisfying read' Margaret Forster; 'Morgan is careful to challenge the preconceptions of his historical characters... His skill is in bringing to life Jemmy's understandings of the deceitful atmosphere swirling around him' The Times"