This, the first prize-winning volume of David Cairns's life of Berlioz, describes with unprecedented intimacy the composer's early life and career until the celebrated performance of Symphonie Fantastique in 1832. Cairns depicts a character of titanic energy and ambition in the process of becoming one of the most distinctive personalities and artists of the romantic era. In his struggles to escape his family's influence and plans, his move to Paris, and the exhausting setbacks of his early career, Berlioz emerges a figure at once recognisably modern and yet possessed by an unapproachable intensity of experience.