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 à Troie_. In
_Les Troyens à 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 Brünnhilde; 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."[74]
[Footnote 74: _Musikführer_, 29 November, 1903.]
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."[75]
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 _Roméo_), 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.[76]
[Footnote 75: _Mémoires_, II, 361.]
[Footnote 76: M. Jean Marnold has remarked this genius for monody in
Berlioz in his article on _Hector Berlioz, musicien (Mercure de France_,
15 January, and 1 February, 1905).]
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 Händel, 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 _opéra-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,[77] by which they effaced the more individual
characteristics of the French spirit. The most French of all these
styles is the _opéra-comique_, the work of two foreigners, but owing
much more to the _opéra-bouffe_ than is generally admitted, and, in any
case, representing France very insufficiently.
[Footnote 77: Gluck himself said this in a letter to the _Mercure de
France_, February, 1773.]
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.[78]
By force of circumstance, therefore, French music found itself moulded
in foreign musical forms. And in the same way that Germany in the
eighteenth century tried to imitate French architecture and literature,
so France in the nineteenth century acquired the habit of speaking
German in music. As most men speak more than they think, even thought
itself became Germanised; and it was difficult then to discover, through
this traditional insincerity, the true and spontaneous form of French
musical thought.
But Berlioz's genius found it by instinct. From the first he strove to
free French music from the oppression of the foreign tradition that was
suffocating it.[79]
[Footnote 78: I am not speaking of the Franco-Flemish masters at the end
of the sixteenth century: of Jannequin, Costeley, Claude le Jeune, or
Mauduit, recently discovered by M. Henry Expert, who are possessed of so
original a flavour, and have yet remained almost entirely unknown from
their own time to ours. Religious wars bruised France's musical
traditions and denied some of the grandeur of her art.]
[Footnote 79: It is amusing to find Wagner comparing Berlioz with Auber,
as the type of a true French musician--Auber and his mixed Italian and
German opera. That shows how Wagner, like most Germans, was incapable of
grasping the real originality of French music, and how he saw only its
externals. The best way to find out the musical characteristics of a
nation is to study its folk-songs. If only someone would devote himself
to the study of French folk-song (and there is no lack of material),
people would realise perhaps how much it differs from German folk-song,
and how the temperament of the French race shows itself there as being
sweeter and freer, more vigorous and more expressive.]
He was fitted in every way for the part, even by his deficiencies and
his ignorance. His classical education in music was incomplete. M.
Saint-Saëns tells us that "the past did not exist for him; he did not
understand the old composers, as his knowledge of them was limited to
what he had read about them." He did not know Bach. Happy ignorance! He
was able to write oratorios like _L'Enfance du Christ_ without being
worried by memories and traditions of the German masters of oratorio.
There are men like Brahms who have been, nearly all their life, but
reflections of the past. Berlioz never sought to be anything but
himself. It was thus that he created that masterpiece, _La Fuite en
Égypte_, which sprang from his keen sympathy with the people.
He had one of the most untrammelled spirits that ever breathed. Liberty
was for him a desperate necessity. "Liberty of heart, of mind, of
soul--of everything.... Real liberty, absolute and immense!"[80] And
this passionate love of liberty, which was his misfortune in life, since
it deprived him of the comfort of any faith, refused him any refuge for
his thoughts, robbed him of peace, and even of the soft pillow of
scepticism--this "real liberty" formed the unique originality and
grandeur of his musical conceptions.
[Footnote 80: _Mémoires_, I, 221.]
"Music," wrote Berlioz to C. Lobe, in 1852, "is the most poetic,
the most powerful, the most living of all arts. She ought to be the
freest, but she is not yet.... Modern music is like the classic
Andromeda, naked and divinely beautiful. She is chained to a rock
on the shores of a vast sea, and awaits the victorious Perseus who
shall loose her bonds and break in pieces the chimera called
Routine."
The business was to free music from its limited rhythms and from the
traditional forms and rules that enclosed it;[81] and, above all, it
needed to be free from the domination of speech, and to be released from
its humiliating bondage to poetry. Berlioz wrote to the Princess of
Wittgenstein, in 1856:--
[Footnote 81: "Music to-day, in the vigour of her youth, is emancipated
and free and can do what she pleases. Many old rules have no longer any
vogue; they were made by unreflecting minds, or by lovers of routine for
other lovers of routine. New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the
sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the
breaking of ancient laws. Many forms have become too hackneyed to be
still adopted. The same thing may be entirely good or entirely bad,
according to the use one makes of it, or the reasons one has for making
use of it. Sound and sonority are secondary to thought, and thought is
secondary to feeling and passion." (These opinions were given with
reference to Wagner's concerts in Paris, in 1860, and are taken from _A
travers chants_, p. 312.)
Compare Beethoven's words: "There is no rule that one may not break for
the advancement of beauty."]
"I am for free music. Yes, I want music to be proudly free, to be
victorious, to be supreme. I want her to take all she can, so that
there may be no more Alps or Pyrenees for her. But she must
achieve her victories by fighting in person, and not rely upon her
lieutenants. I should like her to have, if possible, good verse
drawn up in order of battle; but, like Napoleon, she must face the
fire herself, and, like Alexander, march in the front ranks of the
phalanx. She is so powerful that in some cases she would conquer
unaided; for she has the right to say with Medea: 'I, myself, am
enough.'"
Berlioz protested vigorously against Gluck's impious theory[82] and
Wagner's "crime" in making music the slave of speech. Music is the
highest poetry and knows no master.[83] It was for Berlioz, therefore,
continually to increase the power of expression in pure music.
[Footnote 82: Is it necessary to recall the _épître dédicatoire_ of
_Alceste_ in 1769, and Gluck's declaration that he "sought to bring
music to its true function--that of helping poetry to strengthen the
expression of the emotions and the interest of a situation ... and to
make it what fine colouring and the happy arrangement of light and shade
are to a skilful drawing"?]
[Footnote 83: This revolutionary theory was already Mozart's: "Music
should reign supreme and make one forget everything else.... In an opera
it is absolutely necessary that Poetry should be Music's obedient
daughter" (Letter to his father, 13 October, 1781). Despairing probably
at being unable to obtain this obedience, Mozart thought seriously of
breaking up the form of opera, and of putting in its place, in 1778, a
sort of melodrama (of which Rousseau had given an example in 1773),
which he called "duodrama," where music and poetry were loosely
associated, yet not dependent on each other, but went side by side on
two parallel roads (Letter of 12 November, 1778).]
And while Wagner, who was more moderate and a closer follower of
tradition, sought to establish a compromise (perhaps an impossible one)
between music and speech, and to create the new lyric drama, Berlioz,
who was more revolutionary, achieved the dramatic symphony, of which the
unequalled model to-day is still _Roméo et Juliette_.
The dramatic symphony naturally fell foul of all formal theories. Two
arguments were set up against it: one derived from Bayreuth, and by now
an act of faith; the other, current opinion, upheld by the crowd that
speaks of music without understanding it.
The first argument, maintained by Wagner, is that music cannot really
express action without the help of speech and gesture. It is in the name
of this opinion that so many people condemn _a priori_ Berlioz's
_Roméo_. They think it childish to try and _translate_ action into
music. I suppose they think it less childish to _illustrate_ an action
by music. Do they think that gesture associates itself very happily with
music? If only they would try to root up this great fiction, which has
bothered us for the last three centuries; if only they would open their
eyes and see--what great men like Rousseau and Tolstoy saw so
clearly--the silliness of opera; if only they would see the anomalies of
the Bayreuth show. In the second act of _Tristan_ there is a celebrated
passage, where Ysolde, burning with desire, is waiting for Tristan; she
sees him come at last, and from afar she waves her scarf to the
accompaniment of a phrase repeated several times by the orchestra. I
cannot express the effect produced on me by that _imitation_ (for it is
nothing else) of a series of sounds by a series of gestures; I can never
see it without indignation or without laughing. The curious thing is
that when one hears this passage at a concert, one sees the gesture. At
the theatre either one does not "see" it, or it appears childish. The
natural action becomes stiff when clad in musical armour, and the
absurdity of trying to make the two agree is forced upon one. In the
music of _Rheingold_ one pictures the stature and gait of the giants,
and one sees the lightning gleam and the rainbow reflected on the
clouds. In the theatre it is like a game of marionettes; and one feels
the impassable gulf between music and gesture. Music is a world apart.
When music wishes to depict the drama, it is not real action which is
reflected in it, it is the ideal action transfigured by the spirit, and
perceptible only to the inner vision. The worst foolishness is to
present two visions--one for the eyes and one for the spirit. Nearly
always they kill each other.
The other argument urged against the symphony with a programme is the
pretended classical argument (it is not really classical at all).
"Music," they say, "is not meant to express definite subjects; it is
only fitted for vague ideas. The more indefinite it is, the greater its
power, and the more it suggests." I ask, What is an indefinite art? What
is a vague art? Do not the two words contradict each other? Can this
strange combination exist at all? Can an artist write anything that he
does not clearly conceive? Do people think he composes at random as his
genius whispers to him? One must at least say this: A symphony of
Beethoven's is a "definite" work down to its innermost folds; and
Beethoven had, if not an exact knowledge, at least a clear intuition of
what he was about. His last quartets are descriptive symphonies of his
soul, and very differently carried out from Berlioz's symphonies. Wagner
was able to analyse one of the former under the name of "A Day with
Beethoven." Beethoven was always trying to translate into music the
depths of his heart, the subtleties of his spirit, which are not to be
explained clearly by words, but which are as definite as words--in fact,
more definite; for a word, being an abstract thing, sums up many
experiences and comprehends many different meanings. Music is a hundred
times more expressive and exact than speech; and it is not only her
right to express particular emotions and subjects, it is her duty. If
that duty is not fulfilled, the result is not music--it is nothing at
all.
Berlioz is thus the true inheritor of Beethoven's thought. The
difference between a work like _Roméo_ and one of Beethoven's symphonies
is that the former, it would seem, endeavours to express objective
emotions and subjects in music. I do not see why music should not follow
poetry in getting away from introspection and trying to paint the drama
of the universe. Shakespeare is as good as Dante. Besides, one may add,
it is always Berlioz himself that is discovered in his music: it is his
soul starving for love and mocked at by shadows which is revealed
through all the scenes of _Roméo_.
I will not prolong a discussion where so many things must be left
unsaid. But I would suggest that, once and for all, we get rid of these
absurd endeavours to fence in art. Do not let us say: Music can....
Music cannot express such-and-such a thing. Let us say rather, If genius
pleases, everything is possible; and if music so wishes, she may be
painting and poetry to-morrow. Berlioz has proved it well in his
_Roméo_.
This _Roméo_ is an extraordinary work: "a wonderful isle, where a temple
of pure art is set up." For my part, not only do I consider it equal to
the most powerful of Wagner's creations, but I believe it to be richer
in its teaching and in its resources for art--resources and teaching
which contemporary French art has not yet fully turned to account. One
knows that for several years the young French school has been making
efforts to deliver our music from German models, to create a language of
recitative that shall belong to France and that the _leitmotif_ will not
overwhelm; a more exact and less heavy language, which in expressing the
freedom of modern thought will not have to seek the help of the
classical or Wagnerian forms. Not long ago, the _Schola Cantorum_
published a manifesto that proclaimed "the liberty of musical
declamation ... free speech in free music ... the triumph of natural
music with the free movement of speech and the plastic rhythm of the
ancient dance"--thus declaring war on the metrical art of the last three
centuries.[84]
[Footnote 84: _Tribune de Saint Gervais_, November, 1903.]
Well, here is that music; you will nowhere find a more perfect model. It
is true that many who profess the principles of this music repudiate
the model, and do not hide their disdain for Berlioz. That makes me
doubt a little, I admit, the results of their efforts. If they do not
feel the wonderful freedom of Berlioz's music, and do not see that it
was the delicate veil of a very living spirit, then I think there will
be more of archaism than real life in their pretensions to "free music."
Study, not only the most celebrated pages of his work, such as the
_Scène d'amour_ (the one of all his compositions that Berlioz himself
liked best),[85] _La Tristesse de Roméo_, or _La Fête des Capulet_
(where a spirit like Wagner's own unlooses and subdues again tempests of
passion and joy), but take less well-known pages, such as the
_Scherzetto chanté de la reine Mab_, or the _Réveil de Juliette_, and
the music describing the death of the two lovers.[86] In the one what
light grace there is, in the other what vibrating passion, and in both
of them what freedom and apt expression of ideas. The language is
magnificent, of wonderful clearness and simplicity; not a word too much,
and not a word that does not reveal an unerring pen. In nearly all the
big works of Berlioz before 1845 (that is up to the _Damnation_) you
will find this nervous precision and sweeping liberty.
[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.]