Even Berlioz’s own countrymen have been loathe to champion him as one of their own, perhaps because his music is not conventionally “French,” but cosmopolitan in both its style and content. Claude Debussy famously called his compatriot a “monster.” Berlioz, it is true, drew inspiration for his dramatic works—his symphonies and operas—not from French sources, but from Goethe, Byron, Virgil, and Shakespeare. His seeming betrayal of his inheritance of French culture provided the background for a debate in the early 2000s, as the bicentenary of his birth loomed, about whether the composer’s remains should be moved to the Pantheon in Paris, the burial site of many of France’s cultural heroes. (President Jacques Chirac decided that they should not.)
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/02/jacques-barzun-hector-berlioz-stephen-klugewicz.html