The American Spectator

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The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz , translated and edited by David Cairns; Everyman's Library, 2002.) They are a thrilling expression of artistic passion and a fascinating chronicle of 19th-century European musical life. Not wild about Berlioz's music? It doesn't matter. Berlioz's gifts as a prose stylist are so endearing as to make one's opinion of his musical voice irrelevant. Had he never written a note, this book would have earned him a place among Europe's great Romantic spirits. /p>

Rarely has the experience of great art been more eloquently conveyed. On first hearing Shakespeare, for example: "The lightning flash of that sublime discovery opened before me at a stroke the whole heaven of art, illuminating it to its remotest depths. I saw, I understood, I felt... that I was alive and that I must arise and walk."

Such joyous enthusiasms -- for Beethoven, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and others -- make the Memoirs a delight to read. But their most unexpected effect is to reveal that we are living today in the golden age of performance -- despite the death of classical-music composition -- thanks to reforms championed by Berlioz himself. Berlioz fought relentlessly against the shameless mauling of scores by publishers, conductors, and performers. His lacerating description of the "fixes" imposed on The Magic Flute is hilarious -- but also terrifying. We, too, might never have heard Mozart's genius uncorrupted had publishers and performers continued the desecrations that Berlioz so decried.

Equally revelatory are his witty accounts of his conducting tours through Europe. While Berlioz met musicians of the highest artistry (especially in Germany), he also found mediocrity and unprofessionalism that today would be unthinkable in even provincial orchestras. He advises conductors to learn to read scores, and composers and conductors to learn the range of each instrument -- skills that are now routine, thanks, again, in part to Berlioz's influence.

It is fascinating to see how much the musical canon has changed -- few today know the operas of Gaspare Spontini, whom Berlioz ranked uncontroversially in a triumvirate of great modern masters, along with Beethoven... and Weber! But what has not changed is the ecstasy produced by great music. This book expresses that ecstasy with unparalleled power.

Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal.

p> John McCaslin br> None of the books consumed by this reader in 2007 was as powerful or eye-opening as Dominika Dery's childhood memoir, The Twelve Little Cakes . She provides a first-hand account of growing up under a Communist regime that even the sympathetic Ronald Reagan couldn't come close to describe when he set out to tear down the wall. One reviewer noted that the book reads almost like a fairy tale, "replete with a menacing dragon of sorts," except in this case the dragon is the Communist fist that controlled Prague during the 1970s and 1980s. /p>

Making matters worse for Dominika and her struggling parents was the fact that the child's grandparents did not only support the Communist regime, they were its top lieutenants and enforcers -- even when it meant confronting family. By far the most emotionally gripping scene of many is when Dominika comes face-to-face with her grandfather, a renowned Czech surgeon, which in itself would have ripped apart the Iron Curtain had it somehow played out for all the world to see three decades ago.

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