Part 5

But Berlioz was already getting old. His daily cares and stormy domestic life, his disappointments and passions, 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 passion 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."

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 Damnation de Faust (1846); since 1833, he had been thinking of Beatrice et Benedict (1862); the ideas in Les Troyens were inspired by his childish worship 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"; 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 Laocoon, the finale of the last act of the Les Troyens a Troie, the last scene with Aeneas in Les Troyens a Carthage. 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 "stalactites 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.

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!"

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. 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, 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.

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 classicist; he lacks Berlioz's revolutionary passion 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, "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."

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."

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"--these are the qualities that stir up the crowds in Benvenuto and the armies in the Damnation, that shake earth, heaven, and hell, and are never quenched, but remain devouring and "passionate even when the subject is far removed from passion, and yet also express sweet and tender sentiments and the deepest calm."

Whatever one may think of this volcanic force, of this torrential stream of youth and passion, 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 Damnation 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, and how this feeling impregnated the music of the Damnation, of Romeo, and of Les Troyens.

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 classical 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 noble 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 Cassandre alone would suffice to rank him among the greatest tragic poets that music has ever known. And Cassandre is a worthy sister of Wagner's Bruennhilde; but she has the advantage of coming of a nobler 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 classical nobility 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 workmanship, varied in form, working up by degrees to a climax, and then finishing 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."

Before this, Berlioz had written in 1864:--

"It is quite easy for others to convince themselves that, without even limiting me to take a very short melody as the theme of a composition--as the greatest musicians have often done--I have always endeavoured to put a wealth of melody into my compositions. One may, of course, dispute the worth of these melodies, their distinction, originality, or charm--it is not for me to judge them--but to deny their existence is either unfair or foolish. They are often on a large scale; and an immature or short-sighted musical vision may not clearly distinguish their form; or, again, they may be accompanied by secondary melodies which, to a limited vision, may veil the form of the principal ones. Or, lastly, shallow musicians may find these melodies so unlike the funny little things that they call melodies, that they cannot bring themselves to give the same name to both."

And what a splendid variety there is in these melodies: there is the song in Gluck's style (Cassandre's airs), the pure German lied (Marguerite's song, "D'amour l'ardente flamme"), the Italian melody, after Bellini, in its most limpid and happy form (arietta of Arlequin in Benvenuto), the broad Wagnerian phrase (finale of Romeo), the folk-song (chorus of shepherds in L'Enfance du Christ), and the freest and most modern recitative (the monologues of Faust), which was Berlioz's own invention, with its full development, its pliant outline, and its intricate nuances.

I have said that Berlioz had a matchless gift for expressing tragic melancholy, weariness of life, and the pangs of death. In a general way, one may say that he was a great elegist in music. Ambros, who was a very discerning and unbiassed critic, said: "Berlioz feels with inward delight and profound emotion what no musician, except Beethoven, has felt before." And Heinrich Heine had a keen perception of Berlioz's originality when he called him "a colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle." The simile is not only picturesque, but of remarkable aptness. For Berlioz's colossal force is at the service of a forlorn and tender heart; he has nothing of the heroism of Beethoven, or Haendel, or Gluck, or even Schubert. He has all the charm of an Umbrian painter, as is shown in L'Enfance du Christ, as well as sweetness and inward sadness, the gift of tears, and an elegiac passion.

* * * * *

Now I come to Berlioz's great originality, an originality which is rarely spoken of, though it makes him more than a great musician, more than the successor of Beethoven, or, as some call him, the forerunner of Wagner. It is an originality that entitles him to be known, even more fitly than Wagner himself, as the creator of "an art of the future," the apostle of a new music, which even to-day has hardly made itself felt.

Berlioz is original in a double sense. By the extraordinary complexity of his genius he touched the two opposite poles of his art, and showed us two entirely different aspects of music--that of a great popular art, and that of music made free.

We are all enslaved by the musical tradition of the past. For generations we have been so accustomed to carry this yoke that we scarcely notice it. And in consequence of Germany's monopoly of music since the end of the eighteenth century, musical traditions--which had been chiefly Italian in the two preceding centuries--now became almost entirely German. We think in German forms: the plan of phrases, their development, their balance, and all the rhetoric of music and the grammar of composition comes to us from foreign thought, slowly elaborated by German masters. That domination has never been more complete or more heavy since Wagner's victory. Then reigned over the world this great German period--a scaly monster with a thousand arms, whose grasp was so extensive that it included pages, scenes, acts, and whole dramas in its embrace. We cannot say that French writers have ever tried to write in the style of Goethe or Schiller; but French composers have tried and are still trying to write music after the manner of German musicians.

Why be astonished at it? Let us face the matter plainly. In music we have not, so to speak, any masters of French style. All our greatest composers are foreigners. The founder of the first school of French opera, Lulli, was Florentine; the founder of the second school, Gluck, was German; the two founders of the third school were Rossini, an Italian, and Meyerbeer, a German; the creators of opera-comique were Duni, an Italian, and Gretry, a Belgian; Franck, who revolutionised our modern school of opera, was also Belgian. These men brought with them a style peculiar to their race; or else they tried to found, as Gluck did, an "international" style, by which they effaced the more individual characteristics of the French spirit. The most French of all these styles is the opera-comique, the work of two foreigners, but owing much more to the opera-bouffe than is generally admitted, and, in any case, representing France very insufficiently.

Some more rational minds have tried to rid themselves of this Italian and German influence, but have mostly arrived at creating an intermediate Germano-Italian style, of which the operas of Auber and Ambroise Thomas are a type.

Before Berlioz's time there was really only one master of the first rank who made a great effort to liberate French music: it was Rameau; and, despite his genius, he was conquered by Italian art.