The "Symphonie Fantastique" offers a more complete picture of the composer's musical personality than any other single work. As a specimen of youthful precocity it also stands alone. It was written at the age of twenty-six, when the composer was still a student at the Conservatoire, being persistently snubbed by a group of dons, who all—with the possible exception of Cherubini, the Principal—were utterly his inferiors in every kind of musical power, knowledge, and skill. The experience of Berlioz at the Conservatoire of Paris was very similar to Verdi's at a like institution in Milan; but the marks of genius in work of the student period were far more distinct in Berlioz's than in Verdi's case. We have said that, as a work of precocious genius, the "Symphonie Fantastique" stands alone. No doubt other composers, such as Mozart and Schubert, had shown genius of a higher order at an even earlier age. But the "Symphonie Fantastique," as the work of a 'prentice-hand showing absolute mastery of the greatest and most complex resources, has no parallel. The great fact that has always to be remembered in regard to Berlioz is that he devoted himself with all the energy of an enormous and highly original talent to one particular task in music. That task was the winning of new material for the musical medium, and what Berlioz accomplished in the world of tone was very like what Christopher Columbus accomplished in the world of land and sea. Berlioz too opened up a new hemisphere, and he did his work much more thoroughly than the great navigator. This mighty achievement secures for Berlioz a permanent place of the first importance in the musical hierarchy. But to be deterred by respect for his genius from admitting his faults is not the best way of using his magnificent legacy. Those faults are none the less monstrous for being inseparable from his individuality, and a thoroughly enlightened modern musician would probably find it very difficult to define the attitude of his mind towards the works of Berlioz's art. In a sense, everything in the best of those works, among which the symphony played yesterday is unquestionably to be reckoned, is justified. When one finds an artist dealing with certain subjects as though to the manner born, and with enormous power and resource, one must not condemn him because those subjects are unpleasant or even horrible in the extreme. Such condemnation is not living and letting live. Artistic power is associated with qualities of the highest and rarest that human nature produces, and it is always justified. The favourite subjects of Berlioz may well prove a stumbling-block. "Orgy" very nearly became in his hands a musical form. In at least three different works of his—"Symphonie Fantastique," "Harold in Italy," and "The Damnation of Faust"—we find a movement called by some such name, and, his appetite for horrors not being satisfied with the "Witches' Sabbath" in the first of those three works, he gives us another movement representing a procession to the guillotine of a young man condemned for murdering his sweetheart. In close association with this love of the lurid, spectral, and ghastly is the bitterly ironical spirit which conceived an "Amen" chorus in mock ecclesiastical style to be sung over a dead rat, the guying of the composer's own love-theme with a jig-like variation on a specially ugly instrument (the E flat clarinet) introduced into the orchestra for that purpose, and the use of the stern and majestic Plain Song theme of the "Dies IrÆ" as a cantus firmus, to which the mocking laughter of witches (rushing past through the air in a huge weltering broomstick cavalcade) makes a kind of fantastic counterpoint. It is well to bear in mind that the same talent gave us such miraculous gossamer fancies as the "Queen Mab" Scherzo and the chorus of Sylphs and that most tenderly beautiful and vividly conceived idyll "L'Enfance du Christ."
For the "Symphonie Fantastique" the orchestra had to be considerably enlarged. In addition to all the usual instruments the score requires an E flat clarinet, two bells (G and C), a second harp, an extra kettledrum, and a second bass tuba. Everything had been rehearsed with infinite care, and in all five movements the rendering was a display of virtuosity such as only a very rare combination of favourable circumstances would allow one to hear. No other composer displays a very powerful and skilful orchestra to quite such immense advantage. As Mr. Edward Dannreuther has finely and truly remarked—"With Berlioz the equation between a particular phrase and a particular instrument is invariably perfect." His violently wilful character manifests itself in the harmony. His fancies devour one another, like dragons of the prime, instead of progressing and developing in an orderly manner. But the marvellous beauty of the tone-colouring and aptness of the passage-work never fail. The parts of the symphony most thoroughly enjoyed by the audience were, no doubt, the second movement in waltz rhythm (where the most wonderful use is made of the two harps and the wood-wind) and the march in the fourth movement, where the part symbolising the emotions of the mob rather than of the victim is very brilliant and telling, with suggestions of that Hungarian March which the composer afterwards made his own.
No more original or more enigmatic figure than Hector Berlioz was produced during the nineteenth century by the world of art—a word that may here be understood in its widest acceptation, and thus as including architectural, musical, graphic, plastic, and literary art. In one of the earliest critiques on his "Faust," which was first performed at the OpÉra Comique in Paris in 1846, the opinion was expressed that he ought to have been a chemist, not a musician—a remark that gives extraordinary point to a piece of advice that Berlioz once gave to artists in general: "Always collect the stones that are thrown at you; they may help to build your monument." The remark that Berlioz ought to have been a chemist, originally intended as a sneer, is a perfect case in point. He was a chemist, and it is his chief glory to have been that in the world of music. He tested, analysed, combined anew, and prodigiously enriched those elements of tone which are the material of the musical artist. Of course he was far more than chemist. He was also explorer, but always in search of material for his essentially chemical experiments in tone. One can scarcely wonder that "Faust" was a failure at first. Amongst the happy-go-lucky patchwork of the book is much evidence of that coarse and satirical vein which was so strong in the composer. How could the public be expected to approve of an opera on the subject of Faust that had no love-song or truly lyrical utterance of any kind for the tenor hero, but, on the other hand, had a song about a flea and a rat's requiem, ending with an "Amen" chorus in mock ecclesiastical style, to say nothing of a scene in Pandemonium and an orgie infernale? Berlioz was a sort of a belated mediÆval. The very title, "Damnation de Faust," is mediÆval. Shakespeare and the other poets of Renaissance and later times recognise the fate of a soul as a matter sub judice till the end of the world. But Berlioz had no more scruple than Dante in anticipating the Last Judgment. MediÆval, too, is the coarseness of the scene in Auerbach's cellar; and the chanson gothique, about the King of Thule, sounds as if it had come to the composer as a reminiscence from some previous state of existence, so marvellous is the power of the quaint and weird melody to transport the spirit back to a musty and hierarchic world with walled towns and narrow streets, with terrorism and torture-chambers, with crusades and knight-errantry, with impossible heights of holiness and unimaginable depths of diabolism. But not to any of the defects or qualities rooted in the composer's mediÆvalism must we look for the popularity which the work acquired in this country some thirty-four years after the original production in Paris and has retained ever since. What the general public enjoys is the superb peasants' chorus near the beginning, the arrangement of the RÁcoczy March, which is the finest piece of military music in existence, the chorus and dance of sylphs, Margaret's Romance, and Mephistopheles' Serenade. Perhaps, too, a good many of them take a sort of unregenerate pleasure in the rat and flea songs, while at heart disapproving of such things, and of course they like the ballad of the King of Thule, because no one who is musical at all can entirely fail to perceive the charm of that wonderful melody. It appeals to plenty of listeners who have no idea that there is anything Gothic or mediÆval about it.
The Centenary Celebrations.
December 10, 1903.
Berlioz was the Columbus of music; he discovered the New World. By his theory and practice of orchestration he so greatly enlarged and enriched the resources of tone that all contemporary and subsequent composers capable of understanding his message experienced an immense exhilaration—a sense that new and hitherto undreamed-of possibilities were opening out before them. The starting-point of his momentous voyages was the idea of what is called "programme music." Like Wagner, he perceived that after Beethoven symphonic music could do no more on the old lines, but that music might learn to characterise much more sharply than it had ever done before. His prodigious reform, enlargement, and enrichment of orchestration was entirely carried out under the influence of the desire for stronger and finer characterisation, for a more varied and interesting play of emotion and graphic suggestion. A good many musicians and music-lovers at the present day, recognising the enormous merit of Berlioz's achievement in orchestration, yet consider that, like Moses, he was not allowed to enter the promised land to which he had led his people; or, more literally, that Berlioz was not able to make really good use of his own discoveries, the importance of which is to be recognised in the music of Wagner, DvorÀk, TchaÏkovsky, and others who learned from Berlioz, rather than in his own music. While admitting that later men, such as those mentioned, have used the Berlioz instrument to a more spiritual kind of purpose or with greater epic and dramatic significance, the open-minded music-lover can scarcely deny that the compositions of Berlioz, considered as absolute works of art, include a majestic array of masterpieces. Such things as the "Te Deum" and "Messe des Morts" bear, in their unparalleled vastness of conception, the stamp of an imagination comparable only to Michel Angelo's. They are mighty fragments of larger works never carried out—impossible to be carried out. The best-known work by Berlioz—and the most perfect, on the whole, of the extended works—is the "Faust," which must not be judged as an operatic version of Goethe's "Faust," but rather as a musical setting of the "Faust" story in the racy and drastic manner of the mediÆval puppet plays, Goethe's drama being only used in so far as it affords suggestions for scenes of the well-salted and drastic animation that Berlioz loved. Berlioz was a typical French Romantic. His music is absolutely wanting in the ethical element that is so strong in Bach and Beethoven. But he had a powerful and truly poetic sense of the wonderful, the beautiful, the weird, and the characteristic. Over and over again in his "Faust" he achieves typical excellence. That rapture of spring which is one of the great, imperishable poetic themes has nowhere in music been better rendered than in the first pages of "Faust" (orchestra and tenor voice), and the ensuing peasant choruses are by far the best musical expression of that "sunburnt mirth" which outside the world of art is only possible under a southern sky. The RÁcoczy March as orchestrated by Berlioz is not only the finest piece of military music in the world but is an immeasureably long way ahead of the next best piece. The energy, gaiety, and tumultuous eloquence of the final section (altogether Berlioz's own, of course), give us the musical symbol of "La Gloire"—that important conception which has played a part in history for three centuries. The scene on the banks of the Elbe is woven of moonbeams and gossamer fancies that no other composer could have handled. The rhythm of the Mephisto serenade is too good for this world. Here the composer succeeds in expressing the diabolical without any direct suggestion of malice—simply by creating the rhythm and accent of laughter too monstrously whole-hearted and full-blooded for a mere man. Another miracle is the "Chanson Gothique" (about the King of Thule), which is, as it were, the distilled essence of all mediÆval romances about lovesick maidens looking forth from their casements. In the latter part the composer falls a victim to his evil genius—the macabre,—and the terrible squint of the madman is perceptible in the "Ride to the Abyss" and the howling and gibbering of demons, which entirely lack the significance of the demons in "Gerontius," and simply show us the composer indulging his taste for the grotesque horrors of the old miracle plays. The latter part of the composition should not be taken too seriously. Even in the early part there is one example of the composer's peculiar fondness for guying the offices of religion. But this, too, should be lightly passed over and forgiven in consideration of the feast that the work as a whole offers to the imagination and the bracing salt wind of the composer's manly and affirmative genius.
