Part 13

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.

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."