Chapter 5

[Footnote 85: _Mémoires_, II, 365.]

[Footnote 86: "This composition contains a dose of sublimity much too strong for the ordinary public; and Berlioz, with the splendid insolence of genius, advises the conductor, in a note, to turn the page and pass it over" (Georges de Massougnes, _Berlioz_). This fine study by Georges de Massougnes appeared in 1870, and is very much in advance of its time.]

Then there is the freedom of his rhythms. Schumann, who was nearest to Berlioz of all musicians of that time, and, therefore, best able to understand him, had been struck by this since the composition of the _Symphonic fantastique_,[87] He wrote:--

"The present age has certainly not produced a work in which similar times and rhythms combined with dissimilar times and rhythms have been more freely used. The second part of a phrase rarely corresponds with the first, the reply to the question. This anomaly is characteristic of Berlioz, and is natural to his southern temperament."

Far from objecting to this, Schumann sees in it something necessary to musical evolution.

"Apparently music is showing a tendency to go back to its beginnings, to the time when the laws of rhythm did not yet trouble her; it seems that she wishes to free herself, to regain an utterance that is unconstrained, and raise herself to the dignity of a sort of poetic language."

And Schumann quotes these words of Ernest Wagner: "He who shakes off the tyranny of time and delivers us from it will, as far as one can see, give back freedom to music."[88]

[Footnote 87: "Oh, how I love, honour, and reverence Schumann for having written this article alone" (Hugo Wolf, 1884).]

[Footnote 88: _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_. See _Hector Berlioz und Robert Schumann_. Berlioz was constantly righting for this freedom of rhythm--for "those harmonies of rhythm," as he said. He wished to form a Rhythm class at the Conservatoire (_Mémoires_, II, 241), but such a thing was not understood in France. Without being as backward as Italy on this point, France is still resisting the emancipation of rhythm (_Mémoires_, II, 196). But during the last ten years great progress in music has been made in France.]

Remark also Berlioz's freedom of melody. His musical phrases pulse and flow like life itself. "Some phrases taken separately," says Schumann, "have such an intensity that they will not bear harmonising--_as in many ancient folk-songs_--and often even an accompaniment spoils their fulness."[89] These melodies so correspond with the emotions, that they reproduce the least thrills of body and mind by their vigorous workings-up and delicate reliefs, by splendid barbarities of modulation and strong and glowing colour, by gentle gradations of light and shade or imperceptible ripples of thought, which flow over the body like a steady tide. It is an art of peculiar sensitiveness, more delicately expressive than that of Wagner; not satisfying itself with the modern tonality, but going back to old modes--a rebel, as M. Saint-Saëns remarks, to the polyphony which had governed music since Bach's day, and which is perhaps, after all, "a heresy destined to disappear."[90]

[Footnote 89: _Ibid_. "A rare peculiarity," adds Schumann, "which distinguishes nearly all his melodies." Schumann understands why Berlioz often gives as an accompaniment to his melodies a simple bass, or chords of the augmented and diminished fifth--ignoring the intermediate parts.]

[Footnote 90: "What will then remain of actual art? Perhaps Berlioz will be its sole representative. Not having studied the pianoforte, he had an instinctive aversion to counterpoint. He is in this respect the opposite of Wagner, who was the embodiment of counterpoint, and drew the utmost he could from its laws" (Saint-Saëns).]

How much finer, to my idea, are Berlioz's recitatives, with their long and winding rhythms,[91] than Wagner's declamations, which--apart from the climax of a subject, where the air breaks into bold and vigorous phrases, whose influence elsewhere is often weak--limit themselves to the quasi-notation of spoken inflections, and jar noisily against the fine harmonies of the orchestra. Berlioz's orchestration, too, is of a more delicate temper, and has a freer life than Wagner's, flowing in an impetuous stream, and sweeping away everything in its course; it is also less united and solid, but more flexible; its nature is undulating and varied, and the thousand imperceptible impulses of the spirit and of action are reflected there. It is a marvel of spontaneity and caprice.

[Footnote 91: Jacques Passy notes that with Berlioz the most frequent phrases consist of twelve, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty bars. With Wagner, phrases of eight bars are rare, those of four more common, those of two still more so, while those of one bar are most frequent of all (_Berlioz et Wagner_, article published in _Le Correspondant_, 10 June, 1888).]

In spite of appearances, Wagner is a classicist compared with Berlioz; he carried on and perfected the work of the German classicists; he made no innovations; he is the pinnacle and the close of one evolution of art. Berlioz began a new art; and one finds in it all the daring and gracious ardour of youth. The iron laws that bound the art of Wagner are not to be found in Berlioz's early works, which give one the illusion of perfect freedom.[92]

[Footnote 92: One must make mention here of the poorness and awkwardness of Berlioz's harmony--which is incontestable--since some critics and composers have been able to see (Am I saying something ridiculous?--Wagner would say it for me) nothing but "faults of orthography" in his genius. To these terrible grammarians--who, two hundred years ago, criticised Molière on account of his "jargon"--I shall reply by quoting Schumann.

"Berlioz's harmonies, in spite of the diversity of their effect, obtained from very scanty material, are distinguished by a sort of simplicity, and even by a solidity and conciseness, which one only meets with in Beethoven.... One may find here and there harmonies that are commonplace and trivial, and others that are incorrect--at least according to the old rules. In some places his harmonies have a fine effect, and in others their result is vague and indeterminate, or it sounds badly, or is too elaborate and far-fetched. Yet with Berlioz all this somehow takes on a certain distinction. If one attempted to correct it, or even slightly to modify it--for a skilled musician it would be child's play--the music would become dull" (Article on the _Symphonie fantastique_).

But let us leave that "grammatical discussion" as well as what Wagner wrote on "the childish question as to whether it is permitted or not to introduce 'neologisms' in matters of harmony and melody" (Wagner to Berlioz, 22 February, 1860). As Schumann has said, "Look out for fifths, and then leave us in peace."]

As soon as the profound originality of Berlioz's music has been grasped, one understands why it encountered, and still encounters, so much secret hostility. How many accomplished musicians of distinction and learning, who pay honour to artistic tradition, are incapable of understanding Berlioz because they cannot bear the air of liberty breathed by his music. They are so used to thinking in German, that Berlioz's speech upsets and shocks them. I can well believe it. It is the first time a French musician has dared to think in French; and that is the reason why I warned you of the danger of accepting too meekly German ideas about Berlioz. Men like Weingartner, Richard Strauss, and Mottl--thoroughbred musicians--are, without doubt, able to appreciate Berlioz's genius better and more quickly than we French musicians. But I rather mistrust the kind of appreciation they feel for a spirit so opposed to their own. It is for France and French people to learn to read his thoughts; they are intimately theirs, and one day will give them their salvation.

* * * * *

Berlioz's other great originality lay in his talent for music that was suited to the spirit of the common people, recently raised to sovereignty, and the young democracy. In spite of his aristocratic disdain, his soul was with the masses. M. Hippeau applies to him Taine's definition of a romantic artist: "the plebeian of a new race, richly gifted, and filled with aspirations, who, having attained for the first time the world's heights, noisily displays the ferment of his mind and heart." Berlioz grew up in the midst of revolutions and stories of Imperial achievement. He wrote his cantata for the _Prix de Rome_ in July, 1830, "to the hard, dull noise of stray bullets, which whizzed above the roofs, and came to flatten themselves against the wall near his window."[93] When he had finished this cantata, he went, "pistol in hand, to play the blackguard in Paris with the _sainte canaille_." He sang the _Marseillaise_, and made "all who had a voice and heart and blood in their veins"[94] sing it too. On his journey to Italy he travelled from Marseilles to Livourne with Mazzinian conspirators, who were going to take part in the insurrection of Modena and Bologna. Whether he was conscious of it or not, he was the musician of revolutions; his sympathies were with the people.

[Footnote 93: _Mémoires_, I, 155.]

[Footnote 94: These words are taken from Berlioz's directions on the score of his arrangement of the _Marseillaise_ for full orchestra and double choir.] Not only did he fill his scenes in the theatre with swarming and riotous crowds, like those of the Roman Carnival in the second act of _Benvenuto_ (anticipating by thirty years the crowds of _Die Meistersinger_), but he created a music of the masses and a colossal style. His model here was Beethoven; Beethoven of the Eroica, of the C minor, of the A, and, above all, of the Ninth Symphony. He was Beethoven's follower in this as well as other things, and the apostle who carried on his work.[95] And with his understanding of material effects and sonorous matter, he built edifices, as he says, that were "Babylonian and Ninevitish,"[96] "music after Michelangelo,"[97] "on an immense scale."[98]

[Footnote 95: "From Beethoven," says Berlioz, "dates the advent in art of colossal forms" (_Mémoires_, II, 112). But Berlioz forgot one of Beethoven's models--Händel. One must also take into account the musicians of the French revolution: Mehul, Gossec, Cherubini, and Lesueur, whose works, though they may not equal their intentions, are not without grandeur, and often disclose the intuition of a new and noble and popular art.]

[Footnote 96: Letter to Morel, 1855. Berlioz thus describes the _Tibiomnes_ and the _Judex_ of his _Te Deum_. Compare Heine's judgment: "Berlioz's music makes me think of gigantic kinds of extinct animals, of fabulous empires.... Babylon, the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the wonders of Nineveh, the daring buildings of Mizraim."]

[Footnote 97: _Mémoires_, I, 17.]

[Footnote 98: Letter to an unknown person, written probably about 1855, in the collection of Siegfried Ochs, and published in the _Geschichte der französischen Musik_ of Alfred Bruneau, 1904. That letter contains a rather curious analytical catalogue of Berlioz's works, drawn up by himself. He notes there his predilection for compositions of a "colossal nature," such as the _Requiem_, the _Symphonie funèbre et triomphale_, and the _Te Deum_, or those of "an immense style," such as the _Impériale_.]

It was the _Symphonie funèbre et triomphale_ for two orchestras and a choir, and the _Te Deum_ for orchestra, organ, and three choirs, which Berlioz loved (whose finale _Judex crederis_ seemed to him the most effective thing he had ever written[99]), as well as the _Impériale_, for two orchestras and two choirs, and the famous _Requiem_, with its "four orchestras of brass instruments, placed round the main orchestra and the mass of voices, but separated and answering one another at a distance." Like the _Requiem_, these compositions are often crude in style and of rather commonplace sentiment, but their grandeur is overwhelming. This is not due only to the hugeness of the means employed, but also to "the breadth of the style and to the formidable slowness of some of the progressions--whose final aim one cannot guess--which gives these compositions a strangely gigantic character."[100] Berlioz has left in these compositions striking examples of the beauty that may reveal itself in a crude mass of music. Like the towering Alps, they move one by their very immensity. A German critic says: "In these Cyclopean works the composer lets the elemental and brute forces of sound and pure rhythm have their fling."[101] It is scarcely music, it is the force of Nature herself. Berlioz himself calls his _Requiem_ "a musical cataclysm."[102]

[Footnote 99: _Mémoires_, II, 364. See also the letter quoted above.]

[Footnote 100: _Mémoires_, II, 363. See also II, 163, and the description of the great festival of 1844, with its 1,022 performers.]

[Footnote 101: Hermann Kretzschmar, _Führer durch den Konzertsaal_.]

[Footnote 102: _Mémoires_, I, 312.]

These hurricanes are let loose in order to speak to the people, to stir and rouse the dull ocean of humanity. The _Requiem_ is a Last Judgment, not meant, like that of the Sixtine Chapel (which Berlioz did not care for at all) for great aristocracies, but for a crowd, a surging, excited, and rather savage crowd. The _Marche de Rakoczy_ is less an Hungarian march than the music for a revolutionary fight; it sounds the charge; and Berlioz tells us it might bear Virgil's verses for a motto:--

" ... Furor iraque mentes Praecipitant, pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis."[103]

When Wagner heard the _Symphonic funèbre et triomphale_ he was forced to admit Berlioz's "skill in writing compositions that were popular in the best sense of the word."

"In listening to that symphony I had a lively impression that any little street boy in a blue blouse and red bonnet would understand it perfectly. I have no hesitation in giving precedence to that work over Berlioz's other works; it is big and noble from the first note to the last; a fine and eager patriotism rises from its first expression of compassion to the final glory of the apotheosis, and keeps it from any unwholesome exaggeration. I want gladly to express my conviction that that symphony will fire men's courage and will live as long as a nation bears the name of France."[104]

[Footnote 103: Letter to some young Hungarians, 14 February, 1861. See the _Mémoires_, II, 212, for the incredible emotion which the _Marche de Rakoczy_ roused in the audience at Budapest, and, above all, for the astonishing scene at the end:--

"I saw a man enter unexpectedly. He was miserably clad, but his face shone with a strange rapture. When he saw me, he threw himself upon me and embraced me with fervour; his eyes filled with tears, and he was hardly able to get out the words, 'Ah, monsieur, monsieur! moi Hongrois ... pauvre diable ... pas parler Français ... un poco Italiano. Pardonnez mon extase.... Ah! ai compris votre canon.... Oui, oui, la grande-bataille.... Allemands chiens!' And then striking his breast violently: 'Dans le coeur, moi ... je vous porte.... _Ah! Français ... révolutionnaire ... savoir faire la musique des révolutions_!'"]

[Footnote 104: Written 5 May, 1841.]

How do such works come to be neglected by our Republic? How is it they have not a place in our public life? Why are they not part of our great ceremonies? That is what one would wonderingly ask oneself if one had not seen, for the last century, the indifference of the State to Art. What might not Berlioz have done if the means had been given him, or if his works had found a place in the fêtes of the Revolution? Unhappily, one must add that here again his character was the enemy of his genius. As this apostle of musical freedom, in the second part of his life, became afraid of himself and recoiled before the results of his own principles, and returned to classicism, so this revolutionary fell to sullenly disparaging the people and revolutions; and he talks about "the republican cholera," "the dirty and stupid republic," "the republic of street-porters and rag-gatherers," "the filthy rabble of humanity a hundred times more stupid and animal in its twitchings and revolutionary grimacings than the baboons and orang-outangs of Borneo."[105]

[Footnote 105: Berlioz never ceased to inveigh against the Revolution of 1848--which should have had his sympathies. Instead of finding material, like Wagner, in the excitement of that time for impassioned compositions, he worked at _L'Enfance du Christ_. He affected absolute indifference--he who was so little made for indifference. He approved the State's action, and despised its visionary hopes.] What ingratitude! He owed to these revolutions, to these democratic storms, to these human tempests, the best of all his genius--and he disowned it all. This musician of a new era took refuge in the past.

* * * * *

Well, what did it matter? Whether he wished it or not, he opened out some magnificent roads for Art. He has shown the music of France the way in which her genius should tread; he has shown her possibilities she had never before dreamed of. He has given us a musical utterance at once truthful and expressive, free from foreign traditions, coming from the depths of our being, and reflecting our spirit; an utterance which responded to his imagination, to his instinct for what was picturesque, to his fleeting impressions, and his delicate shades of feeling. He has laid the strong foundation of a national and popular music for the greatest republic in Europe.

These are shining qualities. If Berlioz had had Wagner's reasoning power and had made the utmost use of his intuitions, if he had had Wagner's will and had shaped the inspirations of his genius and welded them into a solid whole, I venture to say that he would have made a revolution in music greater than Wagner's own; for Wagner, though stronger and more master of himself, was less original and, at bottom, but the close of a glorious past.

Will that revolution still be accomplished? Perhaps; but it has suffered half a century's delay. Berlioz bitterly calculated that people would begin to understand him about the year 1940.[106]

After all, why be astonished that his mighty mission was too much for him? He was so alone.[107] As people forsook him, his loneliness stood out in greater relief. He was alone in the age of Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, and Franck; alone, yet containing a whole world in himself, of which his enemies, his friends, his admirers, and he himself, were not quite conscious; alone, and tortured by his loneliness. Alone--the word is repeated by the music of his youth and his old age, by the _Symphonie fantastique_ and _Les Troyens_. It is the word I read in the portrait before me as I write these lines--the beautiful portrait of the _Mémoires_, where his face looks out in sad and stern reproach on the age that so misunderstood him.

[Footnote 106: "My musical career would finish very pleasingly if only I could live for a hundred and forty years" _(Mémoires_, II, 390).]

[Footnote 107: This solitude struck Wagner. "Berlioz's loneliness is not only one of external circumstances; its origin is in his temperament. Though he is a Frenchman, with quick sympathies and interests like those of his fellow-citizens, yet he is none the less alone. He sees no one before him who will hold out a helping hand, there is no one by his side on whom he may lean" (Article written 5 May, 1841). As one reads these words, one feels it was Wagner's lack of sympathy and not his intelligence that prevented him from understanding Berlioz. In his heart I do not doubt that he knew well who was his great rival. But he never said anything about it--unless perhaps one counts an odd document, certainly not intended for publication, where he (even he) compares him to Beethoven and to Bonaparte (Manuscript in the collection of Alfred Bovet, published by Mottl in German magazines, and by M. Georges de Massougnes in the _Revue d'art dramatique_, 1 January, 1902).]

WAGNER

"SIEGFRIED"

There is nothing so thrilling as first impressions. I remember when, as a child, I heard fragments of Wagner's music for the first time at one of old Pasdeloup's concerts in the Cirque d'Hiver. I was taken there one dull and foggy Sunday afternoon; and as we left the yellow fog outside and entered the hall we were met by an overpowering warmth, a dazzling blaze of light, and the murmuring voice of the crowd. My eyes were blinded, I breathed with difficulty, and my limbs soon became cramped; for we sat on wooden benches, crushed in a narrow space between solid walls of human beings. But with the first note of the music all was forgotten, and one fell into a state of painful yet delicious torpor. Perhaps one's very discomfort made the pleasure keener. Those who know the intoxication of climbing a mountain know also how closely it is associated with the discomforts of the climb--with fatigue and the blinding light of the sun, with out-of-breathness, and all the other sensations that rouse and stimulate life and make the body tingle, so that the remembrance of it all is carved indelibly on the mind. The comfort of a playhouse adds nothing to the illusion of a play; and it may even be due to the entire inconvenience of the old concert-rooms that I owe my vivid recollection of my first meeting with Wagner's work.

How mysterious it was, and what a strange agitation it filled me with! There were new effects of orchestration, new timbres, new rhythms, and new subjects; it held the wild poetry of the far-away Middle Ages and old legends, it throbbed with the fever of our hidden sorrows and desires. I did not understand it very well. How should I? The music was taken from works quite unknown to me. It was almost impossible to seize the connection of the ideas on account of the poor acoustics of the room, the bad arrangement of the orchestra, and the unskilled players--all of which served to break up the musical design and spoil the harmony of its colouring. Passages that should have been made prominent were slurred over, and others were distorted by faulty time or want of precision. Even to-day, when our orchestras are seasoned by years of study, I should often be unable to follow Wagner's thought throughout a whole scene if I did not happen to know the score, for the outline of a melody is often smothered by the accompaniment, and so its sentiment is lost. If we still find obscurity of meaning in Wagner's works you can imagine how much worse it was then. But what did it matter? I used to feel myself stirred with passions that were not human: some magnetic influence seemed to thrill me with both pleasure and pain, and I felt invigorated and happy, for it brought me strength. It seemed as if my child's heart were torn from me and the heart of a hero put in its place.

Nor was I alone in the experience. On the faces of the people round about me I saw the reflection of my own emotions. What was the meaning of it? The audience consisted chiefly of poor and commonplace people, whose faces were lined with the wear and tear of a life without interest or ideals; their minds were dull and heavy, and yet here they responded to the divine spirit of the music. There is no more impressive sight than that of thousands of people held spellbound by a melody; it is by turns sublime, grotesque, and touching.