Napoleon Symphony, , Profile Books, 2012, 1847658911, 9781847658913, 384 pages. A grand and tragi-comic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, this novel unteases and reweaves Napoleon's life - from the first great days of his campaigns in 1796 to exile and death on St. Helena a quarter of a century later. Burgess' Bonaparte is a cuckold, afflicted with heartburn and halitosis while enacting a wily seduction of Tsar Alexander, conquering Egypt and crowning himself Emperor. Witty, sardonic, intellectual, Napoleon Symphony is Burgess at his most challenging and inventive. In creating a novel based on a musical form, Burgess is playing with structure, from the grand, ambitious shape of the novel itself, through to the finer composition of each sentence..

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Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (ISBN 0-224-01009-3) is Anthony Burgess's fictional recreation of the life and world of Napoleon Bonaparte, first published in 1974. Its four "movements" follow the structure of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, known as the Eroica. Burgess said he found the novel "elephantine fun" to write.

Burgess's Bonaparte is a cuckold suffering from heartburn and halitosis who is portrayed as a wily seducer of Tsar Alexander I of Russia. His conquest of Egypt is a central theme of the novel, which presents a comedic but detailed and revealing portrait of an Arab and Muslim society under occupation by a Christian Western power.

Beethoven had originally dedicated his Third Symphony to Bonaparte. But when he learned that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, he tore the dedication from the manuscript. When the work was published it was titled, Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'Uomo (Heroic symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man), known to posterity as the Eroica.

The novel is dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, who had directed the film adaption of Burgess's earlier novel, A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick himself had intended to make a biographical film about Bonaparte, but was dissatisfied with his own screenplay. They corresponded, then met in December 1971. Burgess suggested to Kubrick that the structure of the film could be based on the Eroica symphony, and was asked by Kubrick to write a novel based on this concept to serve as the basis for a screenplay. Using his own knowledge of symphonic structure, Burgess based his writing closely on the sequence of Beethoven's work, with Napoleon's funeral followed by a resurrection. In June 1972 he sent the first section to Kubrick, who responded with regret that the treatment was unsuitable for a film, writing, "the [manuscript] is not a work that can help me make a film about the life of Napoleon." Freed from these constraints, Burgess developed the work into an experimental novel. He reworked the material into a stage play called Napoleon Rising for the Royal Company, but it remained unperformed in his lifetime. It was first performed in a radio adaptation for the BBC on 2 December 2012.[1]

It's a mystery how this masterpiece came to be so misunderstood. Burgess' favorite among his novels (and mine), this work is a tour de force: a novel about Napoleon in four movements that follow the structure of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony (originally dedicated to Bonaparte; then, when Boney crowned himself Emperor, re-dedicated "to the memory of a fallen hero"). Burgess has reconciled the repetitive, cyclic nature of music with the novel's need for narrative forward motion brilliantly, yet his text mirrors the musical structure with uncanny detail -- both short- and long-term. Tempo, texture, key changes, rhythm -- all are there in the book. (For rhythm, check out the beginning of the third chapter while listening to the Eroica's scherzo.) The true miracle of this book, however, is that independently of its stylistic conceit, it is profoundly insightful and profoundly moving. Try reading the second chapter -- counterpart to Beethoven's Funeral March movement, and describing the retreat from Moscow -- without emotion. Or the final chapter, about Napoleon's exile on St. Helena, his surprising friendship with his English gaoler's young daughter, and his death. (Here, Burgess replicates Beethoven's theme-and-variations structure with passages in different literary styles: Austen, Henry James, et al., yet without any feeling of pastiche.) Musicians resented the book because they thought it trivialized Beethoven by "making" his symphony "be about" Napoleon. Literary types resented it -- well, probably because they could never bring off such a feat, themselves. Or because they thought a book about Napoleon should be at least four times as long. Try this book, enjoy it, and be grateful for such a gift of words.

As someone who has read all Anthony Burgess' novels, I must say that while Napoleon Symphony has it moments, it falls considerably short of his better achievements (Clockwork, Nothing Like the Sun, , Dead Man in Deptford). Casting about the Internet for other reviews, it seems this work draws raves or rants: Raves from those transported by Burgess' linguistic felicity, rants from those overwhelmed by it (or scandalized by his liberties with good ol' Ludwig van).

A grand and tragi-comic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, this novel unteases and reweaves Napoleon's life - from the first great days of his campaigns in 1796 to exile and death on St. Helena a quarter of a century later. Burgess' Bonaparte is a cuckold, afflicted with heartburn and halitosis while enacting a wily seduction of Tsar Alexander, conquering Egypt and crowning himself Emperor. Witty, sardonic, intellectual, Napoleon Symphony is Burgess at his most challenging and inventive. In creating a novel based on a musical form, Burgess is playing with structure, from the grand, ambitious shape of the novel itself, through to the finer composition of each sentence.

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was a novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. He is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, but altogether he wrote thirty-three novels, twenty-five works of non-fiction, two volumes of autobiography, three symphonies, more than 150 other musical works, reams of journalism and much more.He was born in Manchester, England and grew up in Harpurhey and Moss Side, went to school in Rusholme, and studied at Manchester University. He lived in Malaya, Malta, Monaco, Italy and the US amongst other places, and is still widely read all over the world. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Criminally out of print, this is Burgess at his best. As good (if not better) than Earthly Powers, and considerably superior to any of the Enderby books. Napoleon Symphony is subtitled 'A Novel in Four Movements', with a portion each for his victories as a general, his rise to First Consul and Emperor, his decline, and finally his exile. The shifts in pace and tone for each movement are wonderful, as are the verse forms which Burgess uses to cover a mass of historical detail with playfulness and brevity.

The result is a novel which achieves the balance between historical context and individual experience better than any I have read. Napoleon himself is an extraordinary force - a tight bundle of angst and energy, possessed by his purposes and destinies. Comical too, with his halitosis, his meandering lines of conversation, his bursts of ego and half-baked philosophy. The sections on the Russia campaign flow over with vivid atrocity and panic, the Paris scenes with farce, the exile with wistfulness and even some tenderness.

An epic drama charting Napoleon Bonaparte's meteoric rise in the early years of the French revolution, set against his tumultuous relationship with Josephine. Written by Anthony Burgess but never performed in his lifetime and now adapted for radio by Anjum Malik. Part of Radio 3's Napoleon season, marking 200 years since his famous retreat from Moscow.

In which Burgess asks - did Napoleon have to exist, or would it have been better all round for someone to have invented him? And then has an admittedly superfluous go at doing just that. I suspect it would appeal more to those with at least a little Bonapartist to them, whereas I've only ever regarded the little shit as a prototype for the breed of hypocrite dictator of which Europe and indeed the world has seen all too much since.

Anthony Burgess was a British novelist, critic and composer. He was also a librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist and educationalist. Born in Manchester, he lived for long periods in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England. His fiction includes (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days o...more Anthony Burgess was a British novelist, critic and composer. He was also a librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist and educationalist. Born in Manchester, he lived for long periods in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England. His fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain's empire in the East; the Enderby quartet of novels about a poet and his muse; Nothing Like the Sun, a recreation of Shakespeare's love-life; A Clockwork Orange, an exploration of the nature of evil; and Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and was a prolific journalist, writing in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, and Carmen for the stage; scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen; invented the prehistoric language spoken in Quest for Fire; and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.

This is from “An Epistle to the Reader,” which closes the novel. Burgess goes on to confess that he has for years been haunted by the “mad idea” of giving “symphonic shape to verbal narrative.” The shape he chose is that of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” said to have been originally dedicted to Bonaparte. The result is “Really a piece of elephantine fun/ Designed to show the thing cannot be done.”

So be it. As an experiment in synaesthesia, “Napoleon Symphony” achieves the status of a curiosity, although one with many pleasing touches, such as the two sharp tweaks of Josephine’s ears which open the symphony. As a comic novel it makes an excellent sampler, covered over with a dazzling variety of fancy stitches in many colors, spelling out Anthony Burgess Me Fecit.

In 25 years, Burgess, who set out to be a composer, has produced 14 novels and a half- dozen critical works. Motifs and metaphors bounce from one to another like sonic waves. The themes are the meaning of time, progess and civilization; the characters-- badgered men trying to put together authentic lives, and foolish or faithless women--are both surrounded by assorted zanies, losers and bureaucrats. A few threads appear and reappear--fortune-telling, dreams, homosexuality, scatology and eschatology. Musical notes chime regularly, and always there are the word games--literary allusions and illusions, crossword-puzzle clues, quotations plastered up in the most unlikely places like handbills for a Shakespearean company on a back-alley fence. As a novelist, Burgess is a wry comic revival of a Renaissance Man.

As the jacket copy says, he has pulled out all the stops in this book--and the result is sometimes near cacophony. Through the First Movement, love letters are interspersed with reports from the front and battles alternate with Paris intrigues both political and sexual in a brisk dance to an unlikely imperial theme. The Second Movement sounds the Funeral March of the Russian defeat, with the Emperor’s dreams of death by water. The Third introduces the dubious Prometheus and hurries him to Elba and Waterloo. The Fourth shows the sick old man chained to his rock at St. Helena, an isle full of literary noises and insubstantial visions.

No doubt because of Burgess’s efforts to key the novel to the symphony, the movement throughout is elliptical, jumpy and sometimes confusing. The narrative is carried by a variety of voices and devices, including heroic verses appropriately footnoted. The war scenes especially suffer from the circumscribed scope and the jerky presentation. Burgess tries to get width and life in these truncated sections by reeling off long lists of soldiers’ names, throwing in chunks of anonymous narrative and dotting the landscape with a few gruesome injuries. The effect is that of six men on a small stage representing a battle--and the lines aren’t good enough to enlarge the narrow action. Throughout the novel, so much is thrown together in a little room that the value of everything is diminished.

There is little sense of historic time, place and condition; except for the musical tie-in, the novel could as well have been about Henry V or Bismarck. This is part of the point, though it is unlikely that the blandness of effect was intended. One war is all wars; one man on horseback all men. N, as Burgess calls him after the coronation, talks grandly of a new order while feeding his own needs and vanities and ordering the necessary cruelties. He muses on the best way to get rid of a prisoner population he cannot feed--if only he could confine them in some unventilated space and pump in a lethal substance. The sycophants around the colossus’s feet speculate on his downfall while they look to their own perquisites. Profane private soldiers carry the burden of the Emperor’s dreams and much of the narration. The enemy is no better than the would-be conqueror, often crueler. Perhaps the harshest denunciation leveled at him is that of a young German patriot: N’s grand design is old-fashioned, out-of-date.

In the final section, N tends his garden on St. Helena and talks of his hope of turning all the wold into a cultivated garden, an Eden where he makes creatures out of clay. A feminine apparition (he has never understood women) in a dream of the dying “Promethopoleon” coolly rebukes him for his failures and excesses. The most lasting effect of his great plan has been to goad the rising mystical nationalism of the Germans into a political form.

He gave the world a vision of the heroic, he responds, a vision of the exceptional being: “The nature of the hero has to be made manifest.” By the force of his being, he created many others on the field of history. How much better, she replies, if someone “gifted for that kind of artification” had created him in words or music: “The essence of the heroic. . .with no one compelled to rise in the cold morning to go out and die.”

The questions of the quality of the heroic (and its left-handed mirror-image), the need for it and the source of it are compelling and give a retrospective shape to the novel. Yet this theme too high doth seem for B’s low comic turns. His Napoleon is a slavering but inadequate lover; he hides his hand in his bosom first to fondle Josephine’s portrait and later to gentle his chronic heartburn; he is afraid of the “feminine” element of water, but wets his pants when he’s mad. The contrary view of N firing the troops with his oratory, dropping crowns from his pocket and confusing himself with Jesus Christ does not correct the image. The double vision doesn’t quite come together, except fleetingly in the last section.

Essentially this book is not so much about Napoleon as about Anthony Burgess writing a novel. As such it has many pleasures. All of the Burgess embellishments are here, and they sing alluringly each to each, even if they don’t swell into a larger harmony. (You get it: love-heartburn; water-l’eau.) Burgess’s most impressive successes, “Nothing Like the Sun” and “A Clockwork Orange,” have been novels in which the play with language and literature has been part of the larger intent, essential to a concerted whole. The flourishes often seem gratuitous here--except of course for the fun of it. And that is saying a good deal. Even when we don’t know what all the pyrotechnics are celebrating, we can still enjoy a good display.

It is 40 years since Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange was released in Britain, and 50 years since Anthony Burgess published the original novel of the same name. Although both the book and the film have established themselves among the canon of 20th-century classics, another Burgess/Kubrick project from the early Seventies has remained completely unknown. Newly discovered letters in the Burgess archives have revealed their intended collaboration on a film about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, which will finally bear fruit later this year when BBC Radio broadcasts the premiere of Napoleon Rising, Burgess’s dramatic version of the Napoleon story. Napoleon Symphony, the novel that sprang from this project and was published originally in 1974, is being reissued by Serpent’s Tail this month.

Kubrick’s involvement with Napoleon began in 1968, shortly after he completed work on 2001: a Space Odyssey. Having completed his science-fiction epic, the director turned his attention to the possibility of making a historical costume drama, which would feature enormous battles reminiscent of his earlier film, Spartacus (1960). He planned to film armies of up to 40,000 men, wearing printed paper uniforms, from a helicopter. In a production note from 1968, he wrote that newly developed fast photographic lenses would allow him to film interiors using ordinary window light – or even candlelight – which, he said, “will look much more beautiful and realistic than artificial light”.

Kubrick was determined to film Napoleon’s complete career, from his childhood in Corsica to his death on St Helena, with historically accurate costumes and realistic dialogue. His preparations for the film were so detailed that they could accurately be described as Napoleonic. Kubrick hired Felix Markham, an Oxford historian who had written a biography of Bonaparte, to compile a day-by-day chronology of the Corsican conqueror. He wanted to know everything about Napoleon, including details of where (and with whom) he had slept every night of his life, what he ate, and the names of his servants, staff, friends and enemies. Markham and his team of assistants produced thousands of cross-referenced file cards, containing a wealth of biographical information. http://kgarch.org/k2j.pdf http://kgarch.org/e3e.pdf http://kgarch.org/b8l.pdf http://kgarch.org/h34.pdf http://kgarch.org/bdn.pdf http://kgarch.org/n5h.pdf http://kgarch.org/ndk.pdf http://kgarch.org/h19.pdf http://kgarch.org/7ch.pdf http://kgarch.org/511.pdf http://kgarch.org/825.pdf http://kgarch.org/8gh.pdf http://kgarch.org/14c3.pdf http://kgarch.org/1452.pdf