The greatest blessing of his undistinguished schooldays in the stuffy timewarp of Aix-en-Provence was a friendship with a

The greatest blessing of his undistinguished schooldays in the stuffy timewarp of Aix-en-Provence was a friendship with a large, ungainly youth, son of a wealthy hatter turned banker, named Paul Cezanne. Zola pere, visionary and spendthrift, described in one official document as ''engineer-architect-topographer'', died when Emile was two, leaving the boy's mother with a mountain of debts and lawsuits. What had Zola done to achieve such acclaim, and why, in his own age, did his resounding success dwarf those of Balzac and Flaubert, his fellow gods in the French fictional pantheon?His beginnings were hardly promising. Oscar Wilde sent him flowers and there was a ball at the Guildhall with the Lord Mayor in full fig, where a French correspondent described the author of Le Debacle passing bemused amid a crowd shouting ''Zola! Zola! Hurrah!'', its foremost ranks composed of young ladies dressed in white, whose ''large, naive, pure eyes, that had never read the things written by the honoured gentleman, intently devoured him''. Even if something which called itself the National Vigilance Association had earlier successfully doomed the English publisher of his novel La Terre to bankruptcy and imprisonment, Zola was now in forgiving mood and concluded a stirring speech at an official banquet with a toast to ''the universal fellowship of authors in the republic of letters''. It is hard to imagine a modern British newspaper proprietor taking the trouble in person to meet a foreign novelist off the train, let alone a crowd gathering to applaud. That's how it came to Berlioz; and, as Norrington might agree, if that's the way back into the music, why not just enjoy it.. When Zola visited London in 1893 as guest of honour at the annual congress of the Institute of Journalists, he was met at Victoria Station by the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph who, shaking the novelist warmly by the hand in the presence of numerous onlookers, spoke of ''the feelings of respect and admiration which your marvellous fecundity inspires''.

If you closed your eyes, there the lovers were, Hollywood-style, in the soaring cellos So what. The bonus lay in the set-pieces, heard in the pure colours of the respective tonal groups, with an almost audible time-lag between violins and double-basses on a stage this depth. "Queen Mab" was traumatic nightmare, the balcony scene, with rapturous flute and cor anglais, of almost tangible beauty. No fewer than three choirs were taking part, some 240 singers in all, and their appearance on the platform was theatrically compelling. First to arrive were the Schutz Choir of London, warm and precise in the Prologue and Strophes, with mezzo Sarah Walker and tenor John Mark Ainsley the mellifluous soloists. They then disappeared off stage to sing the young Capulets after the ball, before returning with the London Philharmonic Choir and Brighton Festival Chorus to drown out the orchestra in Juliet's funeral cortege and the closing graveside ceremonies, joined by bass Miguel Angel Zapater as Friar Laurence.Inflated it may be, yet Norrington maintained a strict regard for detail, leaving the larger form of the work to speak for itself. "Be authentic; clap whenever you approve," he told us, and we did, though thanks to Berlioz the symphonic flow remained unruptured.

Kettledrums took the high ground, left and right, while four harps loomed large as stage properties. We've heard his Beethoven, his Brahms and his Wagner, so his Berlioz sounded like even more good news. There were no new theories here, however, although the layout, with first and second fiddles, then woodwind, cellos and brass in two concentric semi-circles, was 19th-century. Imagine that culture is "red in tooth and claw", a competitive arena in which rival memes compete for survival. Another version has an older and a younger man in similar pose Hmm. We could not otherwise endure the sight."A new biography of Smith by Ian Simpson Ross points out that Robert Burns read Smith's book some time before he wrote the lines:O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae mony a blunder free usAnd foolish notion.My parents used to have this verse as part of the house decoration, embroidered and framed and hung on my bedroom wall. What we do know is that he did not get where he is today by playing Mr Nice Guy.

The bait for Roger Norrington and the London Philharmonic on St Valentine's Day was "The Romantic Experience": not, as it proved, one of the conductor's striking essays in authenticity but a topical phrase to catch an audience. Berlioz's hybrids are firmly in the Mahlerian brigade of scope and duration, but perhaps need even more of a pretext than the Symphony of a Thousand to be brought back down from the attic. Schumann said that to correct his technical flaws would be to replace character with banality. On the larger scale, his four fantastic symphonies are not canonic additions to the genre but vivid musical tales of how one very singular person thought, dreamt and felt Orchestras still approach them on these terms. Berlioz the eccentric is a prejudice you leave at the door these days when listening to his Romeo and Juliet Even so, don't kid yourself he was just like one of us.

What the show as a whole needs is more of the skewing that the composer Chris Monks visits upon Purcell in his incidental music. This displays a spark of freshness and originality that is mostly missing elsewhere.Booking to 23 March, 0161-833 9833. But most, particularly Annabel Mullion's Lydia Languish, whose sensibility should be secure from the least iota of sense, are too straight, show too much of the character's own best account of themselves and too little of the satire directed at them. It is hard after this to arrest us with that exit - and it drew mock "aahs" rather than an uncomfortable pause.But the responsibility is far from Maureen Lipman's alone, for until this moment the production has ambled about Russell Craig's uninformative set without an interpretive care in the world. There are spells when other characters show they are really as loopy as Mrs M, such as Jonathan Weir in Faulkland's frenzy at the supposed lasciviousness of his Julia's dancing and John Thomson's early scenes as fat Bob Acres. Maureen Lipman plays Malaprop as a dippy grotesque, bouffant in all directions and with an exaggerated avian sharpness about the face that might just put us in mind of a recent Prime Minister - "female punctuation", as Mrs Malaprop put it (meaning punctiliousness), forbids her hinting further. We recognise some pathos in the wounded dignity with which she admits to the ludicrous love letters to Sir Lucius - "I own the soft impeachments" - but until then we are given what we came for - a bravura version of a comic type we can relish and ridicule.