Chapter 3

Nevertheless, he loved her, and loved her desperately. How pathetic it is. One has little inclination to smile when one sees the depths of that desolate heart. Do you think he did not see, as clearly as you or I would see, the wrinkled old face, the indifference of age, the "_triste raison_," in her he idealised? Remember, he was the most ironical of men. But he did not wish to see these things, he wished to cling to a little love, which would help him to live in the wilderness of life.

"There is nothing real in this world but that which lives in the heart.... My life has been wrapped up in the obscure little village where she lives.... Life is only endurable when I tell myself: 'This autumn I shall spend a month beside her.' I should die in this hell of a Paris if she did not allow me to write to her, and if from time to time I had not letters from her."

So he spoke to Legouvé; and he sat down on a stone in a Paris street, and wept. In the meantime, the old lady did not understand this foolishness; she hardly tolerated it, and sought to undeceive him.

[Footnote 47: _Mémoires_, II, 396.]

"When one's hair is white one must leave dreams--even those of friendship.... Of what use is it to form ties which, though they hold to-day, may break to-morrow?"

What were his dreams? To live with her? No; rather to die beside her; to feel she was by his side when death should come.

"To be at your feet, my head on your knees, your two hands in mine--so to finish."[48]

He was a little child grown old, and felt bewildered and miserable and frightened before the thought of death.

Wagner, at the same age, a victor, worshipped, flattered, and--if we are to believe the Bayreuth legend--crowned with prosperity; Wagner, sad and suffering, doubting his achievements, feeling the inanity of his bitter fight against the mediocrity of the world, had "fled far from the world"[49] and thrown himself into religion; and when a friend looked at him in surprise as he was saying grace at table, he answered: "Yes, I believe in my Saviour."[50]

[Footnote 48: _Mémoires_, II, 415.]

[Footnote 49: "Yes, it is to that escape from the world that _Parsifal_ owes its birth and growth. What man can, during a whole lifetime, gaze into the depths of this world with a calm reason and a cheerful heart? When he sees murder and rapine organised and legalised by a system of lies, impostures, and hypocrisy, will he not avert his eyes and shudder with disgust?" (Wagner, _Representations of the Sacred Drama of Parsifal at Bayreuth, in 1882_.)]

[Footnote 50: The scene was described to me by his friend, Malwida von Meysenbug, the calm and fearless author of _Mémoires d'une Idéaliste_.]

Poor beings! Conquerors of the world, conquered and broken!

But of the two deaths, how much sadder is that of the artist who was without a faith, and who had neither strength nor stoicism enough to be happy without one; who slowly died in that little room in the rue de Calais amid the distracting noise of an indifferent and even hostile Paris;[51] who shut himself up in savage silence; who saw no loved face bending over him in his last moments; who had not the comfort of belief in his work;[52] who could not think calmly of what he had done, nor look proudly back over the road he had trodden, nor rest content in the thought of a life well lived; and who began and closed his _Mémoires_ with Shakespeare's gloomy words, and repeated them when dying:--

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."[53]

[Footnote 51: "I have only blank walls before my windows. On the side of the street a pug dog has been barking for an hour, a parrot screaming, and a parroqueet imitating the chirp of sparrows. On the side of the yard the washerwomen are singing, and another parroqueet cries incessantly, 'Shoulder arrms!' How long the day is!"

"The maddening noise of carriages shakes the silence of the night. Paris wet and muddy! Parisian Paris! Now everything is quiet ... she is sleeping the sleep of the unjust" (Written to Ferrand, _Lettres intimes_, pp. 269 and 302).]

[Footnote 52: He used to say that nothing would remain of his work; that he had deceived himself; and that he would have liked to burn his scores.]

[Footnote 53: Blaze de Bury met him one autumn evening, on the quay, just before his death, as he was returning from the Institute. "His face was pale, his figure wasted and bent, and his expression dejected and nervous; one might have taken him for a walking shadow. Even his eyes, those large round hazel eyes, had extinguished their fire. For a second he clasped my hand in his own thin, lifeless one, and repeated, in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper, Aeschylus's words: 'Oh, this life of man! When he is happy a shadow is enough to disturb him; and when he is unhappy his trouble may be wiped away, as with a wet sponge, and all is forgotten'" (_Musiciens d'hier et d'aujourd'hui_).]

Such was the unhappy and irresolute heart that found itself united to one of the most daring geniuses in the world. It is a striking example of the difference that may exist between genius and greatness--for the two words are not synonymous. When one speaks of greatness, one speaks of greatness of soul, nobility of character, firmness of will, and, above all, balance of mind. I can understand how people deny the existence of these qualities in Berlioz; but to deny his musical genius, or to cavil about his wonderful power--and that is what they do daily in Paris--is lamentable and ridiculous. Whether he attracts one or not, a thimbleful of some of his work, a single part in one of his works, a little bit of the _Fantastique_ or the overture of _Benvenuto_, reveal more genius--I am not afraid to say it--than all the French music of his century. I can understand people arguing about him in a country that produced Beethoven and Bach; but with us in France, who can we set up against him? Gluck and César Franck were much greater men, but they were never geniuses of his stature. If genius is a creative force, I cannot find more than four or five geniuses in the world who rank above him. When I have named Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Händel, and Wagner, I do not know who else is superior to Berlioz; I do not even know who is his equal.

He is not only a musician, he is music itself. He does not command his familiar spirit, he is its slave. Those who know his writings know how he was simply possessed and exhausted by his musical emotions. They were really fits of ecstasy or convulsions. At first "there was feverish excitement; the veins beat violently and tears flowed freely. Then came spasmodic contractions of the muscles, total numbness of the feet and hands, and partial paralysis of the nerves of sight and hearing; he saw nothing, heard nothing; he was giddy and half faint." And in the case of music that displeased him, he suffered, on the contrary, from "a painful sense of bodily disquiet and even from nausea."[54]

The possession that music held over his nature shows itself clearly in the sudden outbreak of his genius.[55] His family opposed the idea of his becoming a musician; and until he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old his weak will sulkily gave way to their wishes. In obedience to his father he began his studies in medicine at Paris. One evening he heard _Les Danaïdes_ of Salieri. It came upon him like a thunderclap. He ran to the Conservatoire library and read Gluck's scores.

[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 _Mémoires_, I, 16-18).]

He forgot to eat and drink; he was like a man in a frenzy. A performance of _Iphigénie 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 scènes de Faust_, which was the nucleus of the future _Damnation_;[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 _Roméo 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 Fées, Défense d'aimer_, and _Rienzi_.

[Footnote 56: The _Huit scènes de Faust_ are taken from Goethe's tragedy, translated by _Gérard de Nerval_, and they include: (1) _Chants de la fête de Pâques_; (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 Thulé_; (7) _Romance de Marguerite_, "D'amour, l'ardente flamme," and _Choeur de soldats_; (8) _Sérénade de Méphistophélès_--that is to say, the most celebrated and characteristic pages of the _Damnation_ (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 Fées_ appeared in 1833, when Berlioz had already written the _Fantastique_, the _Huit scènes de Faust, Lelio_, and _Harold; Rienzi_ was only played in 1842, after _Benvenuto_ (1835), _Le Requiem_ (1837), _Roméo_ (1839), _La Symphonie funèbre 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: _Mémoires_, 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 _Roméo_. 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 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 _Mémoires_: "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 scènes de Faust_ (1828) held the germs of _La Damnation de Faust_ (1846); since 1833, he had been thinking of _Béatrice et Bénédict_ (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 _Roméo_, 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 Laocoon, the finale of the last act of the _Les Troyens à Troie_, the last scene with Aeneas in _Les Troyens à 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 "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.

[Footnote 63: _Mémoires_, 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 à 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" (_Mémoires_, I, 158).]

[Footnote 66: M. Camille Saint-Saëns 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 _Traité 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 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,[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 passage and reassured 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 passage'" _(Mémoires_, I, 63).]

[Footnote 69: _Mémoires_, 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 _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."[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 passionate expression, inward warmth, rhythmic in pulses, and unforeseen effects. When I speak of passionate expression, I mean an expression that desperately strives to reproduce the inward feeling of its subject, even when the theme is contrary to passion, 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 _Damnation de Faust_ and in the _Sanctus_ of the _Requiem_" (_Mémoires_, II, 361).]

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.