Francesca Brittan, Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). xv + 357 pp. £94.99.

Abstract

Poised at the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, the worldly and the otherworldly, fantasy defies neat categorization. It is, as memorably depicted in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, an aesthetic mode that transgresses the borders of all that is familiar, probing the strange, irrational side of human psychology. While studies in the fields of literary criticism and the visual arts have grappled with the ontological slipperiness of fantasy, 1 its aural dimensions, particularly in the context of nineteenth-century culture, have evaded sustained exegesis. Music, in Francesca Brittan's words, 'is the final hurdle, the most difficult medium to capture and theorize. But in the case of fantasy it isquite obviouslycrucial' (p. 4). In this thought-provoking and eloquently written book, Brittan more than rises to the challenge, capturing with imaginative flair the sound of fantasy in contexts that range from the magical and the oneiric to the demonic and the grotesque. In the Introduction, which maps out the book's critical terrain, Brittan notes that her study is 'concerned with the ways in which music interfaced with literary and visual fantasy and, more pointedly, with fantasy's emergence as a compositional category' (p. 5). 2 To address these avenues of enquiry, she pursues a multisensory and multidisciplinary approach, inviting the reader to enter the 'interstitial space between reading, hearing, seeing, and sensing' (p. 5), a space from which one will emerge with a deepened understanding of the pervasive yet complex status of fantasy in the nineteenth century. Brittan encapsulates her methodology thus: To discover where fantasy resides and how it works, we must be willing to … slip from visual and musical discourses through literary, medical, philosophical, and technological ones, often occupying between-spaces. This kind of intermediality and disciplinary blurring can feel precarious, compromising our status as experts, forcing us into foreign or uncertain territory. But it is also emancipatory, allowing musicological questions to become broader inquiries about the nature of intellectual (poetic, magical, made-up) history (p. 13).