VI HECTOR BERLIOZ

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HECTOR BERLIOZ


VI
HECTOR BERLIOZ


Not many years ago three Americans, coming, late one afternoon, in the course of a walking tour in northern France, to the little cathedral town of Beauvais, found its ordinarily quiet air filled with tumult, bustle, and confusion. The streets, gay with colored bunting and venders' booths, were thronged with crowds of merrymakers; the hum of insatiable conversation was everywhere; no rooms were to be had at the hotels, and their dining rooms were preËmpted by crowds of men in uniform, engaged in an endless round of toasts and speeches. Beauvais was, in a word, the scene of a "Grande FÊte des Pompiers," or Firemen's Festival. The firemen of all the surrounding country had assembled there, had taken possession of the town, and had surrendered themselves to conviviality and joy. It was a spectacle interesting from many points of view; but the fancy of the American observers was most of all struck by certain long strips of bunting which spanned the streets at intervals, bearing in large letters the legend, "Honneur aux victimes du devoir." This, it seemed to them, was the note in this motley symphony most perfectly, inimitably, and deliciously French. These festive firemen, in the midst of their jollifications, did not forget for a moment that it was their proud privilege to stand before the world, so long as cognac allowed them to stand at all, as the honored victims of duty. One hardly knew whether to smile at their ingenuousness, or to thrill in sympathy with their emotion, which, however theatrical, was perfectly sincere; on consideration one did both.

Something of the quandary of these American observers of the very Gallic firemen of Beauvais must perhaps always be experienced by the Anglo-Saxon who tries to understand the French attitude toward life or art, so essentially different are the two types of temperament. It is hard for the stolid, matter-of-fact, insensitive, self-satisfied Anglo-Saxon, singly set upon his business, indifferent to what the world may think of him, to comprehend the subtleties and indirections of the Gaul, who conceives personal conduct as an actor conceives a rÔle, spares no pains or labor to do justice to his part, and feeds on the applause or starves on the indifference of his audience. To your Englishman or American such an ideal seems trivial, artificial. His sense of humor, a faculty in which it must be confessed that the French, for all their wit, are deficient, seizes at once upon the incongruities that must always exist between an ordinary human life and a histrionically conceived rÔle, and in his amusement he often fails to do justice to the intelligence, imagination, and courage that may be brought into play by such a dramatic exercise. Possibly to a higher point of view his own attitude, which he likes to call "practical," and which less friendly critics sometimes call stupid, might seem essentially no better than the playful chivalry of his fellow.

Such thoughts as these are bound to occur to the candid critic of that singular man, that quintessential Frenchman, Hector Berlioz. On first acquaintance he seems a creature of postures and pretence, grandiloquent, artificial, specious. He resorts to any means to make an impression, keeps his name before the public by journalism, by social eccentricities, by Byronic love-affairs, by all manner of ingenious indirect advertising, thrives only in the smile of the public, and writes much less to express an inner conception of beauty than to dazzle, startle, and stun. He seems to make a religion of idiosyncrasy, and to shrink from nothing but the natural. He lives, speaks, writes, composes, only in the interest of his carefully laid plot to be unprecedented. But then, as one studies him more, one begins to find admirable traits under this fantastic exterior. However artificial his ideal may be, he brings a most vivid and many-sided intelligence to its service; in spite of the opposition to the world in which his excessive individuality places him, his stock of good-nature and of half-ironical, half-kindly wit is inexhaustible; and if he does not worship at an orthodox shrine, he can suffer, and endure, and strive, like a true martyr. And so Berlioz's critic, like the Americans at Beauvais, finally decides to smile at and at the same time to admire him.

Hector Berlioz, born December 11, 1803, at La CÔte St. AndrÉ, a small town in south-eastern France, began his long struggle with the world when, in his nineteenth year, in Paris, whither his parents had sent him to become a doctor like his father, he resolved to abandon the study of medicine for that of music. It was a daring, indeed a rash, resolve, worthy of a born dissenter like Berlioz; for not only were all external forces clearly in league to keep him in the beaten path, but his vocation for music was as yet far from obvious. He played only the flageolet, the flute, and the guitar; his knowledge of harmony was of the slightest; and he himself tells us in his autobiography that he had never seen a full score, but that one day when he found a sheet of paper ruled with twenty-five staves he "realized in a moment the wondrous instrumental and vocal combinations to which they might give rise, and cried out, 'What an orchestral work one might write on that!'" The impulse was there, if the technique was wanting; and when the young medical student chanced to hear a performance of Gluck's "IphigÉnie en Tauride," his smouldering enthusiasm burst at once into unquenchable flame, and he resolved at all hazards to become a musician.

He introduced himself to Lesueur, professor of composition at the Conservatoire, with a cantata in which there were many blunders in harmony, but a good deal of dramatic power also, and on the strength of it became his pupil. He studied the scores of Gluck's operas in the Conservatoire library. With characteristic audacity he proposed to the aged Andrieux, lecturer on literature in the school of medicine, that he should write for him an opera libretto, but received a courteous refusal. He did not hesitate to borrow twelve hundred francs from a friend as a means of producing at the church of Saint-Roch a mass he had written. And all this time he was raising obstacles for himself by his enthusiastic impulsiveness and his utter lack of tact and worldly discretion. The story of his first meeting with Cherubini, a man of far-reaching influence as the director of the Conservatoire, will serve as an example. Cherubini, who was a cold and formal precisian, had made a strict ruling that the male and female readers at the Conservatoire library should enter by different doors. Berlioz "did not see the notice," entered by the women's door, and immediately buried himself in the score of "Alceste." Presently he was recalled to this world by finding Cherubini standing beside him, "a thin, cadaverous figure with a pale face, tumbled hair, and fierce, gleaming eyes." Then arose an angry altercation, ended by the director's ordering the porter to eject the offending student, and a lively chase among the desks. Berlioz, reaching the door, only stopped to announce to the enraged Cherubini that he was "soon coming back to study Gluck again." He did so; but he never conciliated the ill-will of his powerful enemy, who from that day lost no opportunity to frustrate his ambitions.

It was indeed his failure to win one of the Conservatoire prizes, which lost for him the countenance of his parents and plunged him into many misfortunes. His mother at this time threw him off entirely, in anger for which there was much justification; his father, more patient, allowed him a period of probation, after which, if he could not show himself a successful musician, he was to return to the study of medicine. Thus put upon his mettle, he rented a closet of a room up five flights of stairs, lived on bread, raisins, prunes, and dates, and eked out his allowance by taking pupils on the guitar and the flute, and in solfeggio. In this way he even managed to pay half of his debt to the friend who had helped him produce his mass. But alas! this man, as careless and devoid of tact as Berlioz himself, then wrote to the father the story of the loan, requesting a payment in full. Who can wonder that Dr. Berlioz, his toleration at last exhausted, upon paying the balance of the debt cut off entirely the allowance? Not even then, however, would Berlioz accept defeat, but, getting a post as chorus singer in one of the small theatres, continued the struggle to attain the prize on which so much depended. Could he but gain the Prix de Rome, he would be assured an annuity of three thousand francs for five years, the first two to be spent in the French Academy at Rome, the third in Germany, and the last two at home: he would be free to study and compose at leisure, he could show the world and his parents what was in him.

The subject prescribed for the competition in 1826 was the death of Orpheus, on which he proceeded to wreak himself with an ardor we can well imagine. The result was that his bacchanal scene was pronounced unplayable by the mediocre pianist provided to play the pieces to the jury. Berlioz was furious—and most of all, characteristically, at the injustice done his orchestration. "The piano," he cries, "at once reduces all composers to the same level, and places the clever, profound, ingenious instrumentalist on the same platform with the ignorant dunce who knows nothing of this branch of his art. The piano is a guillotine, and severs the head of noble or of churl with the same impartial indifference." As the time of the next trial approached, Berlioz with his usual impolitic frankness made such a nuisance of himself, by criticising in a loud voice, from the pit of the opera house, the liberties taken with the scores of the great masters, that he was debarred altogether by the scandalized authorities. In 1828, missing the first prize by two votes, one of them Cherubini's, he obtained the second prize, consisting of a laurel wreath, a not very valuable gold medal, and a free pass to the opera-house. Still invincible, he prepared himself to storm once more the pedantry of the judges; he did his best, but, in the words of BoÏeldieu, "they found his best too good," and in 1829 the prize was not awarded at all. It was not until 1830 that, at last learning by experience, he wrote his cantata of "Sardanapalus" in the dryest and most conservative style he could compass, leaving out altogether the conflagration scene, which might have proved unplayable, and at any rate would have disturbed the tranquillity of the judges. Discretion won the day; the prize was awarded him, and he was free to depart for Rome, and to finish his cantata to his own satisfaction, which we may be sure he lost no time in doing.

In the meantime, as if these struggles were not enough to engage all his energies, he had been busy playing the first scene of that love-tragedy, or melodrama, or farce—one hardly knows what to call it—which ended by joining him in uneasy and brief wedlock with Henriette Smithson, an Irish actress. It is hard to tell how far the throes of his very Gallic heart were genuine, how far they were manufactured by his susceptible fancy, his literary imagination, and his keen sense for dramatic effect. There is ever about Berlioz a trace of the little boy playing pirate chief; he goes through life with something of that youthful ecstasy of make-believe; and when he tells us of his passions for Mdlles. S——, R——, and M——, when he enumerates his thrills, commemorates his tears, and confides his plans for capture, flight, suicide, or double murder, we wonder whether he really felt all this, or is merely convinced, as a poet and journalist, that he ought thus to have acted.

It was in 1827 that Berlioz first beheld his future wife, who was acting Shakespeare at the OdÉon in a troupe of English players. Of the effect of her Juliet upon him he writes, "After the third act, hardly breathing, in pain as if a hand of iron were squeezing at my heart, I said to myself, with the fullest conviction: 'Ah! I am lost.'" Did he make any attempt to meet the lady whose beauty and genius had so singularly affected him? Not he; such a course would have been painfully commonplace, a terrible descent from poetry to prose. He followed her about with gaunt eyes and dishevelled mien, so that, believing him mad, she asked her friends for protection. He lost himself in melancholy revery, he roamed about the streets at night, in such despair that on one occasion Liszt and Chopin followed him, fearing he might kill himself. Then he rallied his forces in a great resolve; he would win his indifferent mistress by his art; he would give a concert of his own works, and she should hear it. "I will show her," he cried, forgetting in his enthusiasm that she had no ear for music, "that I too am an artist." After heroic labors and economies (for it was at this time that he was supporting himself by singing in the theatre chorus, and he had to work sixteen hours a day copying instrumental parts), after endless struggles with his conductor, who did not understand the music, and with Cherubini, who refused him the only available concert hall, he succeeded in bringing off the concert, only to find that Miss Smithson did not hear of it at all. Shortly afterward she left France for some years.

Disconsolate, Berlioz turned for comfort to a certain Mademoiselle Mooke, to whom he became engaged in 1830, soon after winning the Prix de Rome. This affair, however, went little more smoothly than the other, for hardly had he arrived in Italy before he received a letter from Madame Mooke, informing him that her daughter had married M. Pleyel. His rÔle was thus suddenly changed to that of the abandoned lover, thirsting for revenge; and it must be conceded that he entered upon it with his usual artistic enthusiasm. "Two tears of rage started from my eyes, and my mind was made up on the spot. I meant to fly to Paris, where I had two guilty women and one innocent man"—one sees that magnanimity was a part of the rÔle—"to kill without mercy. As for killing myself afterwards, you can well believe that that was indispensable." Behold him, then, in Florence, supplying himself with two double-barrelled pistols, "two vials of refreshment, such as laudanum and strychnine," and, as a disguise, the entire costume of a lady's-maid—no less—dress, bonnet, green veil, and all. Behold him hesitating but one moment, just long enough to write upon the unfinished score of the Ball Scene in his "Symphonie Fantastique" directions as to how, if the work is played "in his absence," the flute part may be doubled with the clarinets and horns. Behold him, after this lucid interval, travelling to Genoa, where he either attempts suicide by drowning or falls into the water and is fished out by bystanders—his account is somewhat ambiguous—and where he buys a second lady's-maid's costume, having absent-mindedly left the first one in the coach. And then, with his arrival at Nice, he feels that he has done his duty by the part of the wronged lover, he feels that it would be a pity to deprive the world of his still unwritten compositions; youth pleads the charm of life, the beauty of the Italian landscape, and prudence suggests a brief note to the director of the Academy at Rome, providing for a possible return to the fold. "I stop in Nice a whole month, wandering through the orange groves, diving in the sea, sleeping on the mountain heaths.... I live wholly alone, and write the overture to 'King Lear.' I sing, I believe in God. Convalescence has set in." "It is thus," he ingenuously concludes his account of this episode, "that I passed in Nice the twenty happiest days of my life."

On returning to Paris, in 1832, and finding Miss Smithson again playing there, Berlioz tried again, and this time with success, the device of giving a concert of his own works. His "Symphonie Fantastique" and its sequel "Lelio," a monodrama with recitation, were given entire. Whatever might be her ignorance of music, Miss Smithson could hardly fail to divine the reference to herself of a typical passage in the text of "Lelio": "O that I could find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia, that my heart calls to. That I could drink in the intoxication of that mingled joy and sadness that only true love knows! Could I but rest in her arms one autumn evening, rocked by the north wind on some wild heath, and sleep my last, sad sleep!" This somewhat florid wooing was effective; on the day after the concert the oddly assorted pair met for the first time, and in the following summer were married. In taking this daring step Berlioz seems for once to have manfully forgotten his audience and his dramatic unities, and to have acted quite simply and from the heart. His Ophelia was no longer a favorite of the public; she was now neglected and deeply in debt; she had had the misfortune to break her leg in stepping from her carriage, an accident which threatened to end her career on the stage; her parents, as well as his own, were bitterly opposed to the match. In spite of all, Berlioz married her, and made no literary material out of the event except to weave about it one of his incisive antitheses: "On the day of our wedding she had nothing but debts; I, for my part, had three hundred francs ... and had quarrelled again with my parents. But she was mine, I bade defiance to everything." It is much to his credit, too, that when his wife was ill, he quite simply set aside a symphony at which he was working, and wrote feuilletons in order to make more money for her.

But the one thing to which Berlioz could never effectually bid defiance was the radical inconstancy of his own temperament. Once captured and domesticated, his Ophelia began to prove dull; the part of husband gave little play to his romantic capacities; and when he took less and less pains to disguise his boredom, she became jealous even to shrewishness. Presently he sought distraction in the least creditable of all his amours. If the Smithson affair had been drama, or at the least melodrama, and the Mooke episode harmless comedy, the liaison with Mademoiselle Recio, aside from its tragic results, was broad farce. This lady was a second-rate vocalist with an insatiable ambition to sing Berlioz's works, in order to defeat which he had often to resort to ignominious flight, covered by petty prevarication. His devotion to her cannot have resulted in much happiness, and it entirely alienated him from his wife, from whom he separated about 1840. Nevertheless, when she died in 1854, he promptly married this Mademoiselle Recio, with whom he lived in uneasy partnership for eight years.

One of the strangest instances of his morbid appetite for effect at any cost, of the habit of posturing and parading his emotions which ruled him even in matters which should be most private and sacred, is the passage in the autobiography in which he describes, with a Poe-like zest for revolting detail, the reburial of his first wife beside the second in the cemetery of Mont-Martre. The incredible passage need not be quoted in detail, but ends with this sentence, in which the egotism of the sentimentalist stands as naked as it is unashamed: "The two departed ones rest here in peace [sic] to this hour, awaiting the time when I shall bring my own portion of rottenness to that charnel-house." This is an extreme instance of the posturing, the attitudinizing, the grandiloquence and rhetoric, to which Berlioz is always tempted more or less in his accounts of his personal doings and feelings. He does not wilfully misrepresent, but he balks at the grayness of mere fact; he is not exactly a liar, but his romantic imagination simply cannot envisage the commonplace; involuntarily he suppresses here, distorts or exaggerates there, in order that his story may have the spectacular vividness, the dramatic Éclat, which alone can satisfy him.

On the other hand, whenever, treating of general topics, as he does in the "SoirÉes d'Orchestre," the "A Travers Chants," and the "Grotesques de la Musique," he can avoid the pitfall of the confidential, he is one of the most charming of writers. Here his instinct for the salient leads him to put everything in the most vivid, captivating way, but without perversion; one no longer has the uncomfortable sense of being hoaxed, and can give oneself up to the enjoyment of his rich play of metaphor and allusion, his subtle irony, his unfailing good-nature, and his nervous, incisive style. Here, in short, his extraordinary intellectual vivacity is revealed at its best, undegraded by being made to serve those posings which, if not precisely dishonest, are still not quite ingenuous. His description, for example, of the machinations of the claqueurs or hired applauders at the opera house, known in Parisian slang as "Romans," in the seventh and eighth evenings of the "SoirÉes d'Orchestre,"[30] deserves a niche of its own in the literature of satire. After writing at some length "de viris illustribus urbis Romae," he goes on to enumerate the amateurs who swell the ranks of the claque, as follows:—

"They are: simple friends, who admire in good faith all that is to be done on the stage before the lamps are lighted; relations, those claqueurs given by nature; editors, ferocious claqueurs; and especially lovers and husbands. That is why women, besides the host of other advantages they have over men, have still one more chance of success than they. For a woman can hardly applaud her husband or lover to any purpose in a theatre or concert room; besides, she always has something else to do; while the husband or lover, provided he has the least natural capacity or some elementary notions of the art, can often bring about a success of renewal at the theatre.... Husbands are better than lovers for this sort of operation. The latter usually stand in fear of ridicule; they also fear in petto that a too brilliant success may make too many rivals; they no longer have any pecuniary interest in the triumphs of their mistresses. But the husband, who holds the purse-strings, who knows what can be done by a well-thrown bouquet, a well taken-up salvo, a well-communicated emotion, a well-carried recall, he alone dares to turn to account what faculties he has. He has the gift of ventriloquism and of ubiquity. He applauds for an instant from the amphitheatre, crying out: Brava! in a tenor voice, in chest tones; thence he flies to the lobby of the first boxes, and sticking his head through the opening cut in the door, he throws out an Admirable! in a voice of basso profundo while passing by, and then bounds breathless up to the third tier, from whence he makes the house resound with exclamations: 'Delicious! ravishing! Heavens! what talent! it is too much!' in a soprano voice, in shrill feminine tones stifled with emotion. There is a model husband for you, and a hard-working and intelligent father of a family."

The impression of paradox so markedly given by Berlioz's prose writings, in which such insight, wit, and good humor as we have here coexist with the tendency to pose revealed in his accounts of his love affairs, is intensified by his musical compositions. In them also he seems actuated by a desire, not to communicate his real feelings in their simplicity, but to project them into a dramatic conception, and to present that with all the pomp and circumstance of which he is capable. Not truth to inner experience, but vividness of external effect, is his ideal. Yet to the service of this ideal he brings admirable intellectual qualities: ingenuity, resourcefulness, imagination, an originality that scorns all platitude, and, at least in the matter of instrumentation, a matchless technical skill. The brilliant performance of rather specious undertakings—that is Berlioz's artistic cue.

This combination of trivial ends with highly clever means may be illustrated by the "Symphonie Fantastique," a work which, though written early in his career, remains one of his most characteristic productions. How different, to begin with, are the inspirations which a romanticist and a realist derive from the passion of love! Schumann, married to Clara Wieck after years of waiting, utters his joy in a series of songs, the most lyrical, the most intimate, that song literature has to show. Chopin, in an amorous revery, writes in the larghetto of the F-minor Concerto one of the quietest, simplest, most devout of all his pieces. Berlioz, on the contrary, is goaded by the thought of his Ophelia to conceive "a young musician of unhealthily sensitive nature," who "has poisoned himself with opium in a paroxysm of love-sick despair," and to carry this hero through a very detailed drama in five acts.[31] His impulse is, in short, realistic rather than lyrical, and the art in which he embodies it is descriptive and narrative rather than emotionally expressive.

The most important technical result of this realistic attitude is that Berlioz, as we have already noted, treats his melodies, not as materials for a purely musical development, but as symbols of characters or other dramatic motives, thereby anticipating the leit-motif idea which later became so prominent in the work of Wagner and Liszt. The central motive in the "Symphonie Fantastique" is the melody known as "l'idÉe fixe," symbolizing the beloved, roughly transcribed for the piano in Figure XXIV.

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Figure XXIV.

This melody, though it appears in each of the five movements, undergoes but little evolution; it is complete in the first place, and in its later phases is often modified hardly at all, or if so chiefly for dramatic reasons. In the Ball Scene two phrases of it are sounded pianissimo, by the clarinet, just after a sounding climax of the full orchestra,[32] to indicate the hero's remembrance of the beloved in the midst of the festivities. In the third movement, "In the Country," it is given to the oboe and flute (full score, p. 66), and is treated somewhat more ingeniously, its fifth phrase being interrupted by a rough tumult in all the strings. In "The Procession to the Stake" it figures purely as a theatrical property in a highly characteristic and amusing passage. The hero has finished his long march to the place of execution; as he puts his head on the block silence descends upon the scene, and then a single clarinet plays four measures of the theme—"Ah! he thinks of her once more"—but the thought is cut short by a blow of the axe (fortissimo chord, tutti) and the death-rattle (tremolando on three kettle-drums) ends the movement and his life together. Only in the last movement, the frenetic "Witches' Sabbath," is the theme really varied. Here, at p. 102, it appears as in Figure XXV, turned by change of rhythm and the addition of ornament into a grotesque, undignified dance tune.

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Figure XXV.

This is certainly clever, but the incentive, we must remember, is still dramatic rather than musical—it is intended to show the loved one degraded to the horrid form of a witch.

There are many other subordinate features of the technique in which may be discerned the same preoccupation with spectacular effect rather than with musical beauty. The mere noise resorted to by the composer in tuning his drums in the third movement, in order to imitate thunder, has already been mentioned;[33] there is a deal of even more chaotic pandemonium in the last two movements. When the harmonies are in themselves consonant, they are sometimes combined so incongruously as to obliterate all sense of tonality and to generate merely a feeling of haste and confusion, as at page 94 in the score, where the chords of D-flat-major and G-minor tread on one another's heels; so unprecedented was this association of remote harmonies that Berlioz thought it necessary to point out in a foot-note that it was no clerical error, and to beg the violins and violas not to "correct" their parts. Even the scholastic and highly formal device of the fugato he treats with the sang froid of the habitual impressionist in that weird section of the "Witches' Sabbath" in which he makes a sort of devil's fugue, lost in limbo, on the rhythm of the witches' round dance (score, p. 132).

Yet how remarkable is the skill with which he works out his so perverse ideal! His melodies, however they may lack lyrical quality, are always of definite contour and arresting individuality, and frequently of an odd half-insidious, half-challenging appeal. Though Mr. Hadow's charge that "time after time he ruins his cause by subordinating beauty to emphasis, and is so anxious to impress that he forgets how to charm" is undoubtedly just, yet equally true is his further remark that "his sense of rhythm was, at the time when he lived, without parallel in the history of music." Thanks to this sense of rhythm he entirely avoided those wall-paper patterns which make much of the music of romanticism so formally monotonous, and he attained often a splendidly complex, though generally slightly mechanical, organization of phrases. The idÉe fixe is a good example of this prosodic elasticity. It consists of an eight-measure phrase balanced by one of seven measures, four phrases of four measures each in climactic sequence, and a codetta made up of a pair of two-measure phrases and a final phrase of five measures; and with all this variety, the unity of the tune as a whole is unimpeachable. The melody of the song "La Captive" (see Figure XXVI) is most fascinating in its irregular regularity, in the perfect naturalness with which three-measure and two-measure groups alternate and intertwine. In fact, Berlioz is a master of what in poetry we call versification.

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Figure XXVI.

His skill in orchestration is notorious. "Berlioz claims attention first and foremost," says one critic, "as a master of orchestration, perhaps the most ingenious and versatile among all modern composers";[34] and another ranks him with Beethoven, Wagner, and DvorÁk as "one of the four greatest masters of instrumentation the world has ever seen."[35] Unfortunately even in this department he could not entirely resist that craving for sensationalism which was the characteristic vice of his temperament; so that his name has become associated in many minds with merely noisy or eccentric effects that are far from representing him at his best. He loved to pile Pelion upon Ossa, scored his Requiem for sixteen trombones, sixteen trumpets, five ophicleides, twelve horns, eight pairs of kettle-drums, two bass drums, and a gong, in addition to the usual resources, and told with pride of its having frightened one of the listeners into a fit. He was frequently rallied for what Mr. Nordau would call his "megalomania." "Prince Metternich," he tells us in his memoirs, "said to me one day: 'Are you not the man, monsieur, who composes music for five hundred performers?' To which I replied: 'Not always, monseigneur; I sometimes write for four hundred and fifty.'"

Love of the bizarre and the unusual led him often to employ rare instruments, or to use the ordinary ones in freakish ways. The harp, the English horn, and the cornet figure frequently in his scores, and he likes to direct that the horns be put in bags, that the cymbal be suspended and struck with a stick, that the drums be played with sticks covered with sponge. In one instance he ventures a duet between a piccolo and a bass trombone. He describes, in a letter from Germany, a trick by which a trombone player sounds four tones at once, and adds in all seriousness: "Acousticians ought to explain this new phenomenon in the resonance of sonorous tubes; we musicians ought to study it thoroughly and turn it to account when the opportunity presents itself." He was one of the earliest and most indefatigable champions of the valve horns and trumpets made by Sax of Paris, and also, by a less happy inspiration, made propaganda for the cornet À pistons, which is in comparison with its noble cousin, the trumpet, a most vulgar instrument. He was a daring, but not always a cautious, innovator, frequently seeming to set a higher value upon novelty than upon inherent worth.

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Figure XXVII.

His real claim to distinction as a master of the orchestra, however, rests not upon his extravagances, but upon his wonderfully delicate, unerring instinct for the capacities of the common instruments for tone color, both alone and in combination. It has been well said of him that he "thought orchestrally," that with him "the tone color was an essential part of the original design." The themes of the "Dance of Sprites" and the "Dance of Sylphs," in the "Damnation of Faust" (see Figure XXVII), are not merely "tunes," in the generic sense of the word, adaptable to any medium; the first is distinctively a piccolo tune, the second a violin melody. This instinctive sense of what each member of the orchestral family can best do gives Berlioz's sound-mass an unrivalled clarity, felicity, and distinction; it enables him to solve every problem that arises in a quite unconventional way, proceeding, without regard to tradition, to the precise timbre he has imagined, with the economy and certainty of a master. His scores are apt to look rather empty, because he allows so many instruments to remain silent; but they do not sound empty, for each tone is placed where it will "tell" to the utmost, yet without blurring any other. The two dances just mentioned are models of this kind of discretion, as also is the Ball Scene in the "Symphonie Fantastique," in which the variety of the combinations obtained from a few instruments is surprising. First the violins alone play the tune, accompanied by the other strings (page 37 in the full score); then (page 39) the accompaniment is shared between the strings on the first beat of the measure, two harps on the second beat, and the wood wind on the third; next (page 42) second violins, violas, and 'cellos unite on the melody, the wood wind and a cornet emphasize the accent, the first violin embroiders a delicate turn at the end of each measure, and the basses pluck insistent eighth-notes; and finally all the wood wind and the harps take up the tune (at page 47) to an accompaniment of horns and harps. The marvel of it is that all these tonal schemes are of such a perfect elasticity, such a brilliant lightness; this is musical champagne, that makes most other scores seem vapid and heavy, like wine too long uncorked.

The same intellectual ingenuity, curiously dissociated from emotional earnestness, which made Berlioz so clever a melodist and so inimitable a master of orchestral effects, enabled him also to achieve those innovations in the general scheme and intention of instrumental music on which his historical importance mainly depends. By discerning that, although the principle of coherence in all classical and lyrico-romantic music was the interplay and logical evolution of melodies or themes, that is, of purely musical elements, yet a composition might be unified rather by the interplay of characters and events, or in other words of dramatic motives, of which the music was merely representative, he opened the way for Liszt and the modern program composers. He thus became the pioneer of that realistic movement which in our own day has assumed such prominence, providing, as early as 1830, in the "Symphonie Fantastique," which is essentially a realistic work, with program and leading motives, the prototype of many famous modern masterpieces.

The most striking, and to us nowadays the most familiar, of all applications of this scheme of dramatic form is of course that of Wagner in his music-dramas. So far as Wagner's art was conscious it was planned entirely from the dramatic point of view. In the matter of tune he laid stress on "emotive expression," to borrow once more M. Goblot's term, rather than on symmetry of form, discarding regular phrase-balance and definite metre in favor of a loosely knit recitative, quickly responsive to all changes of mood, which he called "infinite melody." So far as definite musical figures appeared at all, they were conceived, not as having any intrinsic value, but as standing for extra-musical ideas: that is, they were not "subjects" or "themes," they were "leading-motives." The larger forms underwent a similar modification; the Italian aria, consisting of a melody, a second contrasting melody, and a repetition of the first, was discarded, in spite of its architectonic beauty, as being undramatic, since action never repeats itself, but ceaselessly changes. Even in purely instrumental pieces the principle of coherence became the imitation of a natural series of events or ideas. One looks in vain, in the "Funeral March" in "GÖtterdÄmmerung," for the kind of thematic development which makes so splendidly organic the "Funeral March" of Beethoven's "Eroica Symphony"; the unity of Wagner's piece depends on its being the narration of the events in the life of a single hero, Siegfried. The Prelude to "Lohengrin," though incidentally a masterpiece of purely musical structure, was conceived as a tone-picture of the descent from heaven, and the return thither, of an angel host bearing the Holy Grail. A more extreme case is the Prelude to the "Rheingold," in which there is no musical structure at all, the whole piece being written upon one unchanging harmony; the motive there is entirely pictorial. Finally, the descriptive and imitative elements in expression are prominent in such characteristic Wagnerian passages as the fire-music and the "Waldweben."

Wagner has thus become the standard instance of a musician dominated by a dramatic ideal, and has proved conclusively the powers of music associated with action. But this "music associated with action," it must be noted, is not, strictly speaking, any longer music at all, but a new art, to which its creator gave the name of music-drama: it appeals not only to the ear through sounds, but to the eye through scenery and actors, and to the understanding through language. To apply the principles which naturally dominate so composite an art as this to the writing of pure instrumental music is a daring and a questionable innovation, which we owe to Berlioz and Liszt. It is one thing to compose in this style a work to be played, sung, and acted in an opera-house, and quite another to cut from the same stuff a symphony to be performed by staid musicians in conventional dress in the concert-room. That Wagner himself was well aware of the difference is shown by a passage in his essay on Liszt's Symphonic Poems, striking enough to be quoted at some length.

"I pardon everybody," says the great music-dramatist, "who has doubted the benefit of a new art-form for instrumental music, for I must own to having so fully shared that doubt as to join those who saw in our program-music a most unedifying spectacle—whereby I felt the drollness of my situation, as I myself was classed among just the program-musicians, and cast into one pot with them. Whilst listening to the best of this sort ... it had always happened that I so completely lost the musical thread that by no manner of exertion could I re-find and knit it up again. This occurred to me quite recently with the love-scene, so entrancing in its principal motives, of our friend Berlioz's 'Romeo and Juliet Symphony'; the great fascination which had come over me during the development of the chief motive was dispelled in the further course of the movement, and sobered down to an undeniable malaise; I discovered at once that, while I had lost the musical thread (i.e. the logical and lucid play of definite motives), I now had to hold on to scenic motives not present before my eye, nor even so much as indicated in the program.... The musician looks quite away from the incidents of ordinary life, entirely upheaves its details and its accidents, and sublimates whatever lies within it to its quintessence of emotional content—to which alone can music give a voice, and music only. A true musical poet, therefore, would have presented Berlioz with this scene in a thoroughly compact ideal form."

Wagner here puts his finger on the chief points of weakness in Berlioz's ingenious scheme. The lack of what he calls the musical thread, and defines most concisely as "the logical and lucid play of definite motives," is indeed a most serious defect, as we have already seen in the case of the "Symphonie Fantastique." Because of it, the composer's best effects seem fragmentary and uncoÖrdinated; however we enjoy his brilliant, affecting, or powerful moments, we miss the sense of inexorable progress, of deliberate accumulation of force, of efflorescence of melodic germs as slow and as steady as a process of nature, which is so overwhelming in the music of Bach and Beethoven. His music is almost always interesting rather than beautiful; he lets our attention dissipate itself upon picturesque details, instead of seizing and concentrating it by the grandeur of his design, the symmetry of his forms, the logic of their evolution. His structures, considered as wholes, however massive and imposing, are fundamentally incoherent; his rhythms, for all their ingenuity, are over-whimsical, restless; his harmony is often awkward, strained, non-sequacious. He cares less for purity than for pungency of style, and seems to be entirely unconscious of the large alloy of incongruity and anticlimax that adulterates his finest conceptions.

These shortcomings were by no means accidental; their cause lay deep in his peculiar temperament. "Berlioz's disposition," says one of his critics with penetration,[36] "was instinctively somewhat inclined to the grotesque; he had not that inborn reverence for the proprieties of nature which is the secret of the highest art achievement. He set his individuality ... above immutable law." Indeed, Berlioz had more than the usual share of the romanticist's indifference to abstract beauty in art, and of the romanticist's impatience of the discipline which alone gives command of it. When he was a boy he showed on every occasion his "unquestioning intolerance of prescriptive right"; he dismissed Lesueur's harmony as "antediluvian," and Reicha's counterpoint as "barbarous." When he was a man he frankly expressed his boredom at the most perfect of musical forms: "A theme without a fugue," he writes in one of his letters, "is rare good luck"; in another he exclaims, "May God preserve you from fugues with four themes on a choral!"; and his attitude towards Bach, the touchstone of all musical taste, is in strange contrast with that of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and indeed almost all of his great contemporaries. "When I was in St. Petersburg," he tells us, "they played me a triple concerto of Bach's.... I do not think they intended to annoy me." In the light of such a confession we are not surprised to find him, in the famous passage in the autobiography wherein he sets forth his pretensions as a composer, making no claim to the highest qualities, to grandeur, restraint, poise, proportion, beauty, but contenting himself with the words, "The dominant qualities of my music are passionate expression, internal fire, rhythmic animation, and unexpected changes."

On the other hand, if he was in some degree forced into the dramatic vein by deficiencies on the musical side, he had also some strong positive qualifications for the work he undertook. A degree of literary cultivation rare among musicians gave him a large choice of motives to draw upon. The symphony, "Romeo and Juliet," the overture, "King Lear," the opera, "Beatrice and Benedict," the "Tempest" fantasia in "Lelio," and some minor pieces, all owe their inspiration to Shakespeare; Byron is drawn upon for the "Corsair" overture and the symphony, "Harold in Italy," and Scott for the overtures, "Waverley" and "Rob Roy"; Goethe for "The Damnation of Faust"; the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini for the overture which bears his name, and Virgil's "Æneid" for the opera, "The Trojans at Carthage." It is true that both in his choice and his utilization of texts he was often characteristically perverse. He considered Thomas Moore one of the great pathetic poets of the world; he garbled "Romeo and Juliet"; he placed Faust in Hungary in order to introduce the Rakoczy March; he made the demons in "Faust" sing in Swedenborg's infernal language—"Irimiru Karabrao! Has! Has! Tradioun Marexil firtrudinxÉ burrudixÉ" ...; in his own programs he perpetrated, with entire gravity, the most mirth-provoking medleys of the sublime and the ridiculous. Yet in spite of his lack of humor, and even at times of ordinary common sense, he brought to the planning and execution of his fantastic conceptions an extraordinary cleverness.

Berlioz is, however, even as a dramatist, open to severe criticism, the nature of which is again suggested by Wagner. In pointing out that in the absence of a purely musical thread one has to hold on to "scenic motives not present to the eye, nor even so much as indicated in the program," Wagner touches upon one of the ineradicable defects of all program-music, its ambiguity. Doubtless it is quite possible, and mildly amusing, to follow, on hearing the "Symphonie Fantastique," the general outlines of the story, but did Berlioz suppose that any one would be able to recognize in his music, otherwise often unintelligible, the details of the "plot"? If so, he was certainly overrating the descriptive powers of sound, and placing too much dependence on the definiteness of a medium which is by nature vague and indeterminate. He was himself conscious of the difficulty; but with his usual arrogance he attributed it, not to any shortcoming in his own art, but to his audience's lack of imagination. To the sixth division of the score of "Romeo and Juliet" he appends this foot-note: "The public has no imagination; pieces which address themselves solely to the imagination have consequently no public. The following instrumental scene is in this predicament, and I think it should be suppressed except when the symphony is to be heard by an audience of the Élite, to whom the fifth act of Shakespeare's tragedy, with Garrick's dÉnoÛement, is extremely familiar, and whose poetic sentiment is very elevated." The thought that possibly a piece of music should not address itself solely to the pictorial imagination does not seem to have occurred to him.

When Berlioz's music does not fail of its effect through being ambiguous, it is very apt to lose itself in triviality; indeed, this, as we have already seen,[37] is one of the imminent dangers besetting all program-music. Why is it that we are rather more inclined to smile than to shudder at the piled-up horrors of the "Witches' Sabbath"? Why does the elaborate machinery which Berlioz assembles in order to stun us leave us so often rather amused or bored? Why is it that we enjoy more than we resent that parody of his style perpetrated by Arnal, in which we are asked "to understand from the second repetition of the first allegro how my hero ties his cravat"? Is it not that there is involved in the programmistic method a subtle insult to our intelligence, that we instinctively rebel against the use of musical tones, by nature so uniquely expressive of inner verities, for the mere delineation of external objects? Wagner seems to think so when, in the last part of his criticism, he says that the musician "looks quite away from the incidents of ordinary life ... and sublimates whatever lies within it to its quintessence of emotional-content." Bourget certainly thinks so when he commands the artist, "Sois belle et tais-toi."

This highest simplicity of the great creative artist, who ignores the accidents and the externals of life, who "looks into his heart and writes," was just what Berlioz, with all his mobile intelligence, all his ingenuity, all his earnest aspiration, could never achieve. There was in him a perversity of temper, a disharmony between the emotional and the intellectual nature, a lack of the sense of proportion or the sense of humor, which made it impossible. The natural seemed to him jejune; the simple, vulgar; the impulsive, crude. To be elaborate, theatrical, calculated, was a necessity of his highly artificial imagination. Just as in his love affairs he was never following an unsophisticated passion, but forever masquerading as an ideal hero, and as in his essays and autobiography he never chronicled, but always dramatized, so in his compositions he could not bring himself to express spontaneous intuitions in naÏve forms, but built up elaborate programs with all the ingenuity of his tireless and resourceful intelligence. All life appeared to him as a magnificent glittering spectacle in which he was playing a leading rÔle; and whether he loved or hated, whether he suffered or enjoyed, whether he succeeded or failed, he hugged close to his Gallic heart the consciousness that he was acting well, and that he had an audience. Like the firemen of Beauvais, he had, too, the ineffable satisfaction of placarding the heavens, in his autobiography, with the inspiring legend, "Honneur aux victimes du devoir."

The boast in his case, nevertheless, was far from an empty one; not the least strange element in his strangely mixed character was the real heroism, the splendid faith, with which he clung to an artistic ideal which was received with contempt or indifference on every side. In his devotion to an unpopular cause, through a lifetime of difficulties, he was a true martyr. His career, after his return from Rome to Paris in 1832, was one long uphill fight, not only for recognition, but for a bare livelihood. His accounts of his hated labors as a feuilletonist, up to the time when, by a generous gift from Paganini, he was freed from such servitude, are among the sincerest and most pathetic pages in his writings. He never won the appreciation from his countrymen that his vain, sensitive, and thoroughly Parisian nature most craved. Realizing, about 1840, that a man is never a prophet in his own country, he reluctantly sought abroad the support denied him at home, and in a series of tours in Germany, Austria, Russia, and England met with a large measure of success. Yet his first care, after each foreign triumph, was to know "what they thought of it in Paris"—and alas! they never thought about it at all. Tardily, in 1856, already over fifty years old, he obtained a fauteuil in the Academy, and was appointed Librarian of the Conservatoire. But the cheering effect of this recognition was clouded by the fiasco, in 1863, of the opera on which he had been working for years, "Les Troyens À Carthage." This blow broke his heart. He wrote no more, and after six years of loneliness and ill-health, died on March 8, 1869. As so often happens, his funeral orations contained the enthusiastic praises his living ears had craved in vain, and he was shortly pronounced the greatest of French composers.

The faith in himself and his art, which kept him steadfast through all his discouragements and temptations, which enabled him to persist in a path of almost complete solitude, which armed him with the sword of conviction and the shield of a good conscience, was, as Mr. Apthorp says, "the one pure, sterling element in a character in which all else was more or less distorted." He was a man of overweening vanity and egotism, often blind to the needs of those nearest him; an uncertain friend, a spiteful enemy, an intolerable husband; he could descend to petty deceits and unworthy animosities, and was willing to sacrifice the most sacred relations on the altar of his dramatic sense. And yet he could say with truth, "The love of money has never allied itself in a single instance with my love of art; I have always been ready to make all sorts of sacrifices to go in search of the beautiful, and insure myself against contact with those paltry platitudes which are crowned by popularity." He had also many minor virtues which, if not like this precisely heroic, are nevertheless charming. He was a sprightly narrator, a witty and keen critic where his prejudices were not involved, and a taster of life in whom discrimination did not embitter good nature.

Concerning his achievement as a musician there will always be extreme oppositions of opinion, so uncompromising was his theory of art, and so relentless his execution of it. The ultimate problem of whether a realism so thoroughgoing as his is justified by the nature of music will perhaps always remain an open one. But the most recalcitrant critic must admit the greatness of his incidental services to the art which he practised with such headlong perversity. He was a good iconoclast. He helped to break the bonds of a narrow conservatism which was in danger of confining all music to the forms of the symphony and the sonata, and to the type of expression perfected by the classicists. By his daring imagination he abashed pedantry and opened up vistas of new possibilities. And he was, at least in one department, that of orchestration, a triumphant innovator. By using instruments, not in traditional, hackneyed ways, but with an intuition of their latent possibilities, he added permanently to the resources of all composers and to the sensitiveness of all listeners. Whether, therefore, the tendency of all music toward the realistic, which is so prominent to-day, and in relation to which he stands as one of the greatest of pioneers, shall continue indefinitely, or shall give place to some new movement in another direction, as certain signs seem to indicate—in any event Berlioz's place as a contributor to the unresting progress of art is secure.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] See "Selections from Berlioz's Writings," translated by W. F. Apthorp, New York, 1879, pp. 228-261.

[31] See the summary of the program of the "Symphonie Fantastique" at p. 24.

[32] Full score, Breitkopf and HÄrtel edition, p. 54.

[33] See Introduction, p. 43.

[34] E. Dickinson, "The Study of the History of Music," p. 264.

[35] W. H. Hadow, "Studies in Modern Music," p. 141.

[36] Francis Hueffer, "Half a Century of Music in England," pp. 231-232.

[37] Introduction, p. 53.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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