Hector Berlioz, the French composer, was born exactly 200 years ago, which I wouldn't call exciting news for the public at large. But everybody jumps on these round-numbered anniversaries, so we've been plunged into Berlioz performances. I've just heard two at Lincoln Center, two-thirds of a three-concert festival. And I'm left with a funny feeling. People say classical music is endangered, and certainly there's trouble -- fewer classical radio stations, less media coverage, near-disaster at major classical record labels, which have to sell pop crossover CDs to survive. Will classical music still be here 30 years from now? Beats me, but reading the program notes from Lincoln Center's Berlioz, I'd give the field about five minutes to live. This, of course, is an extreme reaction, and I'll be told, with some justice, that the program notes aren't important; the music is. And also that the notes were deftly written by top Berlioz scholars, and finally that a festival like this one -- which also included a symposium, which I didn't attend -- is the musical equivalent of a major museum retrospective, which would always be accompanied by an extensive scholarly apparatus. Certainly I shouldn't slight the performances. Colin Davis, who conducted, is vigorous, strong and canny (and good-humored, too); he's a Berlioz specialist. The London Symphony, which he led, might be my favorite orchestra, because the musicians in it play warmly, with wonderful care and strength. They never force their sound, even when they're loud, and they take care of tiny details; I heard, for instance, complete agreement among all the first violins during tricky music that would quickly expose any member of the section who wasn't paying total attention. One of the concerts I heard -- a complete performance of Berlioz's operatic oratorio "The Damnation of Faust" -- was just spectacular, leaping off the stage to infect all of us (a packed house at Avery Fisher Hall) with both its dash and its delicacy. I might complain that Mr. Davis brings a hearty, extroverted tone to the music, while Berlioz, in his time, was an overwrought Romantic; this side of him Mr. Davis doesn't catch. That hurt the other concert I went to, which offered Berlioz's "Romeo et Juliette," a huge and awkward musical translation of Shakespeare. At its heart is love music that shudders just as real lovers sometimes do. With Mr. Davis, the shudders were gloriously musical, but they never felt like living passion. But back to the program notes. They bothered me because a concert can't be a museum show. At a museum, we walk around at leisure, spending an hour with one painting, if we like, and 12 seconds with another. At a classical concert, we sit for the full, white-hot length of each piece, an hour and a half for "Romeo et Juliette," more than two hours for "The Damnation of Faust." Why should we do this? Why should the London Symphony and its chorus -- nearly 200 people, plus support staff -- make the expensive trip from England to give us this experience? And classical music lives in the past, much more than art museums do. That past grows more and more distant every year; even in New York, the headquarters of classical music in the U.S., not many people are interested in serious classical events, even if Berlioz managed to draw packed houses. Nationwide, there's a sense of dawning crisis, as even major institutions look for a new audience, just in case the present one shows signs of disappearing. Why classical concerts exist, then -- what they communicate, why anyone should go to them -- becomes a notable issue. Why should we go to hear Berlioz? Well, if you believe the program note for "Romeo et Juliette," the pressing issues seem to be historical. What did Berlioz learn from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? A fascinating question, for those who care, but 200 people didn't cross the ocean just to illustrate the answer. Nor did 8,000 people (the approximate capacity of Avery Fisher if all three concerts sold out) sear themselves with the intensity of this music just to find out what the answer might be. Surely they came because the music means something in the lives they live right here and now. And this is what the classical music world never explains. What does the music mean? Jane Moss, the vice president for programming at Lincoln Center, wrote in her own introduction to the Berlioz series that Berlioz "speaks powerfully and with the utmost authenticity to the issues, passions, and sensibilities of our own time." I wish she'd put her money on that, and commissioned program notes about what Berlioz says to us today. That's the kind of question classical music never answers -- and if it can't, it probably deserves to die. Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2003