This second volume completes David Cairns's extraordinary life of Berlioz (described by the Financial Times as 'one of the great biographies of our day and one of the great feats of literary sympathy with an artistic genius'). Drawing on a wide range of unpublished and published sources, Cairns recreates the vivid everyday reality of Berlioz's life. He tells in detail of the composer's struggles to establish himself in Paris, and shows how his work was created and performed against the grain ofParisian musical life, where Berlioz earned his living by music criticism and was commonly thought of as a journalist. For the first time biographical justice is done to this fascinating, complex, titanic human being.