Musicians of To-Day Part 3

[Footnote 54: _A travers chants_, pp. 8-9.]

[Footnote 55: In truth, this genius was smouldering since his childhood; it was there from the beginning; and the proof of it lies in the fact that he used for his _Ouverture des Francs-Juges_ and for the _Symphonie fantastique_ airs and phrases of quintets which he had written when twelve years old (see _Memoires_, I, 16-18).]

He forgot to eat and drink; he was like a man in a frenzy. A performance of _Iphigenie en Tauride_ finished him. He studied under Lesueur and then at the Conservatoire. The following year, 1827, he composed _Les Francs-Juges_; two years afterwards the _Huit scenes de Faust_, which was the nucleus of the future _d.a.m.nation_;[56] three years afterwards, the _Symphonie fantastique_ (commenced in 1830).[57] And he had not yet got the _Prix de Rome_! Add to this that in 1828 he had already ideas for _Romeo et Juliette_, and that he had written a part of _Lelio_ in 1829. Can one find elsewhere a more dazzling musical debut?

Compare that of Wagner who, at the same age, was shyly writing _Les Fees, Defense d'aimer_, and _Rienzi_.

[Footnote 56: The _Huit scenes de Faust_ are taken from Goethe's tragedy, translated by _Gerard de Nerval_, and they include: (1) _Chants de la fete de Paques_; (2) _Paysans sous les tilleuls_; (3) _Concert des Sylphes_; (4 and 5) _Taverne d'Auerbach_, with the two songs of the Rat and the Flea; (6) _Chanson du roi de Thule_; (7) _Romance de Marguerite_, "D'amour, l'ardente flamme," and _Choeur de soldats_; (8) _Serenade de Mephistopheles_--that is to say, the most celebrated and characteristic pages of the _d.a.m.nation_ (see M. Prudhomme's essays on _Le Cycle de Berlioz_).]

[Footnote 57: One could hardly find a better manifestation of the soul of a youthful musical genius than that in certain letters written at this time; in particular the letter written to Ferrand on 28 June, 1828, with its feverish postscript. What a life of rich and overflowing vigour! It is a joy to read it; one drinks at the source of life itself.]

He wrote them at the same age, but ten years later; for _Les Fees_ appeared in 1833, when Berlioz had already written the _Fantastique_, the _Huit scenes de Faust, Lelio_, and _Harold; Rienzi_ was only played in 1842, after _Benvenuto_ (1835), _Le Requiem_ (1837), _Romeo_ (1839), _La Symphonie funebre et triomphale_ (1840)--that is to say, when Berlioz had finished all his great works, and after he had achieved his musical revolution. And that revolution was effected alone, without a model, without a guide. What could he have heard beyond the operas of Gluck and Spontini while he was at the Conservatoire? At the time when he composed the _Ouverture des Francs-Juges_ even the name of Weber was unknown to him,[58] and of Beethoven's compositions he had only heard an _andante_.[59]

Truly, he is a miracle and the most startling phenomenon in the history of nineteenth-century music. His audacious power dominates all his age; and in the face of such a genius, who would not follow Paganini's example, and hail him as Beethoven's only successor?[60] Who does not see what a poor figure the young Wagner cut at that time, working away in laborious and self-satisfied mediocrity? But Wagner soon made up for lost ground; for he knew what he wanted, and he wanted it obstinately.

[Footnote 58: _Memoires_, I, 70.]

[Footnote 59: _Ibid_. To make amends for this he published, in 1829, a biographical notice of Beethoven, in which his appreciation of him is remarkably in advance of his age. He wrote there: "The _Choral Symphony_ is the culminating point of Beethoven's genius," and he speaks of the Fourth Symphony in C sharp minor with great discernment.]

[Footnote 60: Beethoven died in 1827, the year when Berlioz was writing his first important work, the _Ouverture des Francs-Juges_.]

The zenith of Berlioz's genius was reached, when he was thirty-five years old, with the _Requiem_ and _Romeo_. They are his two most important works, and are two works about which one may feel very differently. For my part, I am very fond of the one, and I dislike the other; but both of them open up two great new roads in art, and both are placed like two gigantic arches on the triumphal way of the revolution that Berlioz started. I will return to the subject of these works later.

But Berlioz was already getting old. His daily cares and stormy domestic life,[61] his disappointments and pa.s.sions, his commonplace and often degrading work, soon wore him out and, finally, exhausted his power.

"Would you believe it?" he wrote to his friend Ferrand, "that which used to stir me to transports of musical pa.s.sion now fills me with indifference, or even disdain. I feel as if I were descending a mountain at a great rate. Life is so short; I notice that thoughts of the end have been with me for some time past." In 1848, at forty-five years old, he wrote in his _Memoires_: "I find myself so old and tired and lacking inspiration." At forty-five years old, Wagner had patiently worked out his theories and was feeling his power; at forty-five he was writing _Tristan_ and _The Music of the Future_. Abused by critics, unknown to the public, "he remained calm, in the belief that he would be master of the musical world in fifty years' time."[62]

[Footnote 61: He left Henrietta Smithson in 1842; she died in 1854.]

[Footnote 62: Written by Berlioz himself, in irony, in a letter of 1855.]

Berlioz was disheartened. Life had conquered him. It was not that he had lost any of his artistic mastery; on the contrary, his compositions became more and more finished; and nothing in his earlier work attained the pure beauty of some of the pages of _L'Enfance du Christ_ (1850-4), or of _Les Troyens_ (1855-63). But he was losing his power; and his intense feeling, his revolutionary ideas, and his inspiration (which in his youth had taken the place of the confidence he lacked) were failing him. He now lived on the past--the _Huit scenes de Faust_ (1828) held the germs of _La d.a.m.nation de Faust_ (1846); since 1833, he had been thinking of _Beatrice et Benedict_ (1862); the ideas in _Les Troyens_ were inspired by his childish wors.h.i.+p of Virgil, and had been with him all his life. But with what difficulty he now finished his task! He had only taken seven months to write _Romeo_, and "on account of not being able to write the _Requiem_ fast enough, he had adopted a kind of musical shorthand";[63] but he took seven or eight years to write _Les Troyens_, alternating between moods of enthusiasm and disgust, and feeling indifference and doubt about his work. He groped his way hesitatingly and unsteadily; he hardly understood what he was doing. He admired the more mediocre pages of his work: the scene of the Laoc.o.o.n, the finale of the last act of the _Les Troyens a Troie_, the last scene with Aeneas in _Les Troyens a Carthage_.[64] The empty pomposities of Spontini mingle with the loftiest conceptions. One might say that his genius became a stranger to him: it was the mechanical work of an unconscious force, like "stalact.i.tes in a dripping grotto." He had no impetus. It was only a matter of time before the roof of the grotto would give way. One is struck with the mournful despair with which he works; it is his last will and testament that he is making. And when he has finished it, he will have finished everything. His work is ended; if he lived another hundred years he would not have the heart to add anything more to it. The only thing that remains--and it is what he is about to do--is to wrap himself in silence and die.

[Footnote 63: _Memoires_, I, 307.]

[Footnote 64: About this time he wrote to Liszt regarding _L'Enfance du Christ_: "I think I have hit upon something good in Herod's scena and air with the soothsayers; it is full of character, and will, I hope, please you. There are, perhaps, more graceful and pleasing things, but with the exception of the Bethlehem duet, I do not think they have the same quality of originality" (17 December, 1854).]

Oh, mournful destiny! There are great men who have outlived their genius; but with Berlioz genius outlived desire. His genius was still there; one feels it in the sublime pages of the third act of _Les Troyens a Carthage_. But Berlioz had ceased to believe in his power; he had lost faith in everything. His genius was dying for want of nourishment; it was a flame above an empty tomb. At the same hour of his old age the soul of Wagner sustained its glorious flight; and, having conquered everything, it achieved a supreme victory in renouncing everything for its faith. And the divine songs of Parsifal resounded as in a splendid temple, and replied to the cries of the suffering Amfortas by the blessed words: "_Selig in Glauben! Selig in Liebe_!"

II

Berlioz's work did not spread itself evenly over his life; it was accomplished in a few years. It was not like the course of a great river, as with Wagner and Beethoven; it was a burst of genius, whose flames lit up the whole sky for a little while, and then died gradually down.[65] Let me try to tell you about this wonderful blaze.

Some of Berlioz's musical qualities are so striking that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them here. His instrumental colouring, so intoxicating and exciting,[66] his extraordinary discoveries concerning timbre, his inventions of new nuances (as in the famous combining of flutes and trombones in the _Hostias et preces_ of the _Requiem_, and the curious use of the harmonics of violins and harps), and his huge and nebulous orchestra--all this lends itself to the most subtle expression of thought.[67]

[Footnote 65: In 1830, old Rouget de Lisle called Berlioz, "a volcano in eruption" (_Memoires_, I, 158).]

[Footnote 66: M. Camille Saint-Saens wrote in his _Portraits et Souvenirs_, 1900: "Whoever reads Berlioz's scores before hearing them played can have no real idea of their effect. The instruments appear to be arranged in defiance of all common sense; and it would seem, to use professional slang, that _cela ne dut pas sonner_, but _cela sonne_ wonderfully. If we find here and there obscurities of style, they do not appear in the orchestra; light streams into it and plays there as in the facets of a diamond."]

[Footnote 67: See the excellent essay of H. Lavoix, in his _Histoire de l'Instrumentation_. It should be noticed that Berlioz's observations in his _Traite d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes_ (1844) have not been lost upon Richard Strauss, who has just published a German edition of the work, and some of whose most famous orchestral effects are realisations of Berlioz's ideas.]

Think of the effect that such works must have produced at that period.

Berlioz was the first to be astonished when he heard them for the first time. At the _Ouverture des Francs-Juges_ he wept and tore his hair, and fell sobbing on the kettledrums. At the performance of his _Tuba mirum_, in Berlin, he nearly fainted. The composer who most nearly approached him was Weber, and, as we have already seen, Berlioz only knew him late in life. But how much less rich and complex is Weber's music, in spite of its nervous brilliance and dreaming poetry. Above all, Weber is much more mundane and more of a cla.s.sicist; he lacks Berlioz's revolutionary pa.s.sion and plebeian force; he is less expressive and less grand.

How did Berlioz come to have this genius for orchestration almost from the very first? He himself says that his two masters at the Conservatoire taught him nothing in point of instrumentation:--

"Lesueur had only very limited ideas about the art. Reicha knew the particular resources of most of the wind instruments; but I think that he had not very advanced ideas on the subject of grouping them."

Berlioz taught himself. He used to read the score of an opera while it was being performed.

"It was thus," he says,[68] "that I began to get familiar with the use of the orchestra, and to know its expression and timbre, as well as the range and mechanism of most of the instruments. By carefully comparing the effect produced with the means used to produce it, I learned the hidden bond which unites musical expression to the special art of instrumentation; but no one put me in the way of this. The study of the methods of the three modern masters, Beethoven, Weber, and Spontini, the impartial examination of the traditions of instrumentation and of little-used forms and combinations, conversations with virtuosi, and the effects I made them try on their different instruments, together with a little instinct, did the rest for me."[69]

[Footnote 68: One may judge of this instinct by one fact: he wrote the overtures of _Les Francs-Juges_ and _Waverley_ without really knowing if it were possible to play them. "I was so ignorant," he says, "of the mechanism of certain instruments, that after having written the solo in D flat for the trombone in the Introduction of _Les Francs-Juges_, I feared it would be terribly difficult to play. So I went, very anxious, to one of the trombonists of the Opera orchestra. He looked at the pa.s.sage and rea.s.sured me. 'The key of D flat is,' he said, 'one of the pleasantest for that instrument; and you can count on a splendid effect for that pa.s.sage'" _(Memoires_, I, 63).]

[Footnote 69: _Memoires_, I, 64.]

That he was an originator in this direction no one doubts. And no one disputes, as a rule, "his devilish cleverness," as Wagner scornfully called it, or remains insensible to his skill and mastery in the mechanism of expression, and his power over sonorous matter, which make him, apart from his creative power, a sort of magician of music, a king of tone and rhythm. This gift is recognised even by his enemies--by Wagner, who seeks with some unfairness to restrict his genius within narrow limits, and to reduce it to "a structure with wheels of infinite ingenuity and extreme cunning ... a marvel of mechanism."[70]

But though there is hardly anyone that Berlioz does not irritate or attract, he always strikes people by his impetuous ardour, his glowing romance, and his seething imagination, all of which makes and will continue to make his work one of the most picturesque mirrors of his age. His frenzied force of ecstasy and despair, his fulness of love and hatred, his perpetual thirst for life, which "in the heart of the deepest sorrow lights the Catherine wheels and crackers of the wildest joy"[71]--these are the qualities that stir up the crowds in _Benvenuto_ and the armies in the _d.a.m.nation_, that shake earth, heaven, and h.e.l.l, and are never quenched, but remain devouring and "pa.s.sionate even when the subject is far removed from pa.s.sion, and yet also express sweet and tender sentiments and the deepest calm."[72]

[Footnote 70: "Berlioz displayed, in calculating the properties of mechanism, a really astounding scientific knowledge. If the inventors of our modern industrial machinery are to be considered benefactors of humanity to-day, Berlioz deserves to be considered as the true saviour of the musical world; for, thanks to him, musicians can produce surprising effects in music by the varied use of simple mechanical means.... Berlioz lies hopelessly buried beneath the ruins of his own contrivances" (_Oper und Drama_, 1851).]

[Footnote 71: Letter from Berlioz to Ferrand.]

[Footnote 72: "The chief characteristics of my music are pa.s.sionate expression, inward warmth, rhythmic in pulses, and unforeseen effects.

When I speak of pa.s.sionate expression, I mean an expression that desperately strives to reproduce the inward feeling of its subject, even when the theme is contrary to pa.s.sion, and deals with gentle emotions or the deepest calm. It is this kind of expression that may be found in _L'Enfance du Christ_, and, above all, in the scene of _Le Ciel_ in the _d.a.m.nation de Faust_ and in the _Sanctus_ of the _Requiem_" (_Memoires_, II, 361).]

Whatever one may think of this volcanic force, of this torrential stream of youth and pa.s.sion, it is impossible to deny them; one might as well deny the sun.

And I shall not dwell on Berlioz's love of Nature, which, as M.

Prudhomme shows us, is the soul of a composition like the _d.a.m.nation_ and, one might say, of all great compositions. No musician, with the exception of Beethoven, has loved Nature so profoundly. Wagner himself did not realise the intensity of emotion which she roused in Berlioz,[73] and how this feeling impregnated the music of the _d.a.m.nation_, of _Romeo_, and of _Les Troyens_.

[Footnote 73: "So you are in the midst of melting glaciers in your _Niebelungen_! To be writing in the presence of Nature herself must be splendid. It is an enjoyment which I am denied. Beautiful landscapes, lofty peaks, or great stretches of sea, absorb me instead of evoking ideas in me. I feel, but I cannot express what I feel. I can only paint the moon when I see its reflection in the bottom of a well" (Berlioz to Wagner, 10 September, 1855).]

But this genius had other characteristics which are less well known, though they are not less unusual. The first is his sense of pure beauty.

Berlioz's exterior romanticism must not make us blind to this. He had a Virgilian soul; and if his colouring recalls that of Weber, his design has often an Italian suavity. Wagner never had this love of beauty in the Latin sense of the word. Who has understood the Southern nature, beautiful form, and harmonious movement like Berlioz? Who, since Gluck, has recognised so well the secret of cla.s.sical beauty? Since _Orfeo_ was composed, no one has carved in music a bas-relief so perfect as the entrance of Andromache in the second act of _Les Troyens a Troie_. In _Les Troyens a Carthage_, the fragrance of the Aeneid is shed over the night of love, and we see the luminous sky and hear the murmur of the sea. Some of his melodies are like statues, or the pure lines of Athenian friezes, or the n.o.ble gesture of beautiful Italian girls, or the undulating profile of the Albanian hills filled with divine laughter. He has done more than felt and translated into music the beauty of the Mediterranean--he has created beings worthy of a Greek tragedy. His Ca.s.sandre alone would suffice to rank him among the greatest tragic poets that music has ever known. And Ca.s.sandre is a worthy sister of Wagner's Brunnhilde; but she has the advantage of coming of a n.o.bler race, and of having a lofty restraint of spirit and action that Sophocles himself would have loved.

Not enough attention has been drawn to the cla.s.sical n.o.bility from which Berlioz's art so spontaneously springs. It is not fully acknowledged that he was, of all nineteenth-century musicians, the one who had in the highest degree the sense of plastic beauty. Nor do people always recognise that he was a writer of sweet and flowing melodies.

Weingartner expressed the surprise he felt when, imbued with current prejudice against Berlioz's lack of melodic invention, he opened, by chance, the score of the overture of _Benvenuto_ and found in that short composition, which barely takes ten minutes to play, not one or two, but four or five melodies of admirable richness and originality:--

"I began to laugh, both with pleasure at having discovered such a treasure, and with annoyance at finding how narrow human judgment is.

Here I counted five themes, all of them plastic and expressive of personality; of admirable workmans.h.i.+p, varied in form, working up by degrees to a climax, and then finis.h.i.+ng with strong effect. And this from a composer who was said by critics and the public to be devoid of creative power! From that day on there has been for me another great citizen in the republic of art."[74]

[Footnote 74: _Musikfuhrer_, 29 November, 1903.]

Before this, Berlioz had written in 1864:--