Let us first of all look at him biographically and historically, as
he was in himself and in his relations to his contemporaries. His is
perhaps the strangest story in all the records of music. In contrast
to musicians like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, and a score of
others, who grew up from childhood in an atmosphere saturated with
music, Berlioz is born in a country town that is practically destitute
of musical life. Even the piano is not cultivated there, the harp and
guitar being almost the sole instruments known; in 1808--five years
after the birth of Berlioz--there is still only one piano in the
Department. There is no teacher of music in the place; Berlioz's father
ultimately combines with other residents to bring over for this purpose
a second violinist from the theatre at Lyons. Although the music in the
boy cannot quite be kept down, for nearly the first twenty years of his
life he is, to all intents and purposes, ignorant of the elements of
technique, and never hears a bar of first-rate music. "When I arrived
in Paris in 1820,"[2] he says, "I had never yet set foot in a theatre;
all I knew of instrumental music was the quartets of Pleyel with which
the four amateurs composing the Philharmonic Society of my native town
used to regale me each Sunday after mass; and I had no other idea of
dramatic music than what I had been able to get in running through a
collection of old operatic airs arranged with an accompaniment for
the guitar." Yet, untutored as he was, and practically ignorant of
even the elements of harmony, he had from his boyhood been writing
music. The opening melody of the _Symphonie fantastique_ was really
written by Berlioz in his twelfth year, to some verses from Florian's
_Estelle_;[3] and we know of other boyish compositions, fragments
of which have been conserved in some of his later works. It may not
be absolutely true, as M. Edmond Hippeau says, that until the age
of twenty-three he was "ignorant of the most elementary principles
of music"; but at all events he was just beginning to learn these
principles at an age when nine other composers out of ten have left far
behind them all the drudgery of the apprentice. In Paris he does indeed
study after a fashion; but it is characteristic of him that he gets
most of his musical experience from the performances at the Opera, and
from a diligent reading of the scores of Gluck in the library of the
Conservatoire.
Even in Paris, at that time, there was little to call out the best
there was in such a man as Berlioz--little that could teach him the
proper use of his own strange faculties, or by whose standard he could
test the worth of his own inspiration. He did indeed hear a little
Gluck occasionally, and a travesty of Weber; but it was not until 1828
that Beethoven made any impression on Paris. Orchestras were generally
incompetent and audiences ignorant. The calibre of the average French
orchestra of the time may be gauged from the fact that even the more
reputable bands found Mozart's symphonies by no means easy. One
shudders to think what the ordinary orchestras must have been like,
and what was the quality of music to which they had grown accustomed.
As for the audiences, where they were not extremely uneducated they
were extremely prejudiced, clinging blindly to the remains of the
pseudo-classical principles that had been bequeathed to them by their
fathers. An audience that could be worked into a perfect frenzy of rage
because an actor, outraging all the proprieties of the time, actually
referred in _Othello_ to something so vulgar as a handkerchief, would
hardly look with favour on anything revolutionary either in idea or
technique. At the opera the Italians were most in vogue. The French
public knew little of instrumental music pure and simple, and were
almost entirely ignorant of the huge developments of German music.
Cherubini, of course, was a stately and impressive figure, a serious
thinker of the same breed as the great Germans; but apart from him,
there were no Parisian composers who could by any stretch of the
imagination be called modern, or could do anything to teach a man
like Berlioz. Lesueur, the favourite master of Berlioz, seems to have
been progressive--indeed, revolutionary--in some of his theories of
music and poetry; but his theory was better than his practice. From
such a type as the amiable and ineffectual Boïeldieu nothing new could
possibly come. He frankly avowed his inability to understand Beethoven,
and declared to Berlioz his preference for "la musique qui me berce."
Yet this young musician from the country, with years of lost time to
regret, with little musical education, with the very slightest of
stimuli from the great music of the past, and with little encouragement
in his own surroundings, produces in quick succession a number of works
of the most startling originality--original in every way, in the turn
of their melodies, in their harmonic _facture_, in their orchestration,
in their rhythm, in their view of men and things. Now that the complete
Berlioz is being printed, we know a good deal more of him than was
possible even a few years ago. We do not now commence our study of him
with the _Symphonie fantastique_; we can watch the workings of his
brain in the two early cantatas--_Herminie_ and _Cléopâtre_--that in
the eyes of two sapient juries of the time were insufficient to win
him the _Prix de_ _Rome_. Here we see a freshness of outlook and of
style--particularly in the matter of rhythm--that is one of the most
remarkable phenomena in the history of music. In his earliest years, as
in his latest, Berlioz was himself, a solitary figure owing practically
nothing to other people's music, an artist, we may almost say, without
ancestry and without posterity. Mozart builds upon Haydn and influences
Beethoven; Beethoven imitates Mozart and in turn influences the
practice of all later symphonists; Wagner learns from Weber and gives
birth to a host of imitators. But with Berlioz--and it is a point to
be insisted on--there is no one whose speech he tried to copy in his
early years, and there is no one since who speaks with _his_ voice. How
many things in the early Beethoven were made in the factory of Mozart;
how many times does the early Wagner speak with the voice of Weber!
But who can turn over the scores of Berlioz's early works and find a
single phrase that can be fathered upon any previous or contemporary
writer? There was never any one, before his time or since, who thought
and wrote just like him; his musical style especially is absolutely
his own. Now and then in _L'Enfance du Christ_ he suggests Gluck--not
in the turn of his phrases but in the general atmosphere of an aria;
but apart from this it is the rarest thing for him to remind us of any
other composer. His melody, his harmony, his rhythm, are absolutely his
own.