“Mystic Passionate Emotion”: Hector Berlioz’s Uncompromising Catholic Vision

By |2024-12-12T17:04:50-06:00December 10th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Catholicism, Hector Berlioz, Imagination, Music|

Although he wrote a Requiem Mass, Te Deum, and other spiritual compositions, the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz has regularly received brickbats from Catholic listeners. In The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), the Dutch-American organist and choirmaster Joseph Otten decried the Berlioz Requiem as a “sacred work, but it does not express any deep personal faith from Berlioz himself... [...]