BERLIOZ.
[Sidenote: ="Symphonie Fantastique."=
_November 1, 1901._]
The "Symphonie Fantastique" offers a more complete picture of the
composer's musical personality than any other single work. As a specimen
of youthful precocity it also stands alone. It was written at the age of
twenty-six, when the composer was still a student at the Conservatoire,
being persistently snubbed by a group of dons, who all--with the
possible exception of Cherubini, the Principal--were utterly his
inferiors in every kind of musical power, knowledge, and skill. The
experience of Berlioz at the Conservatoire of Paris was very similar to
Verdi's at a like institution in Milan; but the marks of genius in work
of the student period were far more distinct in Berlioz's than in
Verdi's case. We have said that, as a work of precocious genius, the
"Symphonie Fantastique" stands alone. No doubt other composers, such as
Mozart and Schubert, had shown genius of a higher order at an even
earlier age. But the "Symphonie Fantastique," as the work of a
'prentice-hand showing absolute mastery of the greatest and most complex
resources, has no parallel. The great fact that has always to be
remembered in regard to Berlioz is that he devoted himself with all the
energy of an enormous and highly original talent to one particular task
in music. That task was the winning of new material for the musical
medium, and what Berlioz accomplished in the world of tone was very like
what Christopher Columbus accomplished in the world of land and sea.
Berlioz too opened up a new hemisphere, and he did his work much more
thoroughly than the great navigator. This mighty achievement secures for
Berlioz a permanent place of the first importance in the musical
hierarchy. But to be deterred by respect for his genius from admitting
his faults is not the best way of using his magnificent legacy. Those
faults are none the less monstrous for being inseparable from his
individuality, and a thoroughly enlightened modern musician would
probably find it very difficult to define the attitude of his mind
towards the works of Berlioz's art. In a sense, everything in the best
of those works, among which the symphony played yesterday is
unquestionably to be reckoned, is justified. When one finds an artist
dealing with certain subjects as though to the manner born, and with
enormous power and resource, one must not condemn him because those
subjects are unpleasant or even horrible in the extreme. Such
condemnation is not living and letting live. Artistic power is
associated with qualities of the highest and rarest that human nature
produces, and it is always justified. The favourite subjects of Berlioz
may well prove a stumbling-block. "Orgy" very nearly became in his hands
a musical form. In at least three different works of his--"Symphonie
Fantastique," "Harold in Italy," and "The Damnation of Faust"--we find
a movement called by some such name, and, his appetite for horrors not
being satisfied with the "Witches' Sabbath" in the first of those three
works, he gives us another movement representing a procession to the
guillotine of a young man condemned for murdering his sweetheart. In
close association with this love of the lurid, spectral, and ghastly is
the bitterly ironical spirit which conceived an "Amen" chorus in mock
ecclesiastical style to be sung over a dead rat, the guying of the
composer's own love-theme with a jig-like variation on a specially ugly
instrument (the E flat clarinet) introduced into the orchestra for that
purpose, and the use of the stern and majestic Plain Song theme of the
"Dies Iræ" as a _cantus firmus_, to which the mocking laughter of
witches (rushing past through the air in a huge weltering broomstick
cavalcade) makes a kind of fantastic counterpoint. It is well to bear in
mind that the same talent gave us such miraculous gossamer fancies as
the "Queen Mab" Scherzo and the chorus of Sylphs and that most tenderly
beautiful and vividly conceived idyll "L'Enfance du Christ."
For the "Symphonie Fantastique" the orchestra had to be considerably
enlarged. In addition to all the usual instruments the score requires an
E flat clarinet, two bells (G and C), a second harp, an extra
kettledrum, and a second bass tuba. Everything had been rehearsed with
infinite care, and in all five movements the rendering was a display of
virtuosity such as only a very rare combination of favourable
circumstances would allow one to hear. No other composer displays a
very powerful and skilful orchestra to quite such immense advantage. As
Mr. Edward Dannreuther has finely and truly remarked--"With Berlioz the
equation between a particular phrase and a particular instrument is
invariably perfect." His violently wilful character manifests itself in
the harmony. His fancies devour one another, like dragons of the prime,
instead of progressing and developing in an orderly manner. But the
marvellous beauty of the tone-colouring and aptness of the passage-work
never fail. The parts of the symphony most thoroughly enjoyed by the
audience were, no doubt, the second movement in waltz rhythm (where the
most wonderful use is made of the two harps and the wood-wind) and the
march in the fourth movement, where the part symbolising the emotions of
the mob rather than of the victim is very brilliant and telling, with
suggestions of that Hungarian March which the composer afterwards made
his own.
[Sidenote: ="Faust."=
_March 7, 1902._]
No more original or more enigmatic figure than Hector Berlioz was
produced during the nineteenth century by the world of art--a word that
may here be understood in its widest acceptation, and thus as including
architectural, musical, graphic, plastic, and literary art. In one of
the earliest _critiques_ on his "Faust," which was first performed at
the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1846, the opinion was expressed that he
ought to have been a chemist, not a musician--a remark that gives
extraordinary point to a piece of advice that Berlioz once gave to
artists in general: "Always collect the stones that are thrown at you;
they may help to build your monument." The remark that Berlioz ought to
have been a chemist, originally intended as a sneer, is a perfect case
in point. He _was_ a chemist, and it is his chief glory to have been
that in the world of music. He tested, analysed, combined anew, and
prodigiously enriched those elements of tone which are the material of
the musical artist. Of course he was far more than chemist. He was also
explorer, but always in search of material for his essentially chemical
experiments in tone. One can scarcely wonder that "Faust" was a failure
at first. Amongst the happy-go-lucky patchwork of the book is much
evidence of that coarse and satirical vein which was so strong in the
composer. How could the public be expected to approve of an opera on the
subject of Faust that had no love-song or truly lyrical utterance of any
kind for the tenor hero, but, on the other hand, had a song about a flea
and a rat's requiem, ending with an "Amen" chorus in mock ecclesiastical
style, to say nothing of a scene in Pandemonium and an _orgie
infernale_? Berlioz was a sort of a belated mediæval. The very title,
"Damnation de Faust," is mediæval. Shakespeare and the other poets of
Renaissance and later times recognise the fate of a soul as a matter
_sub judice_ till the end of the world. But Berlioz had no more scruple
than Dante in anticipating the Last Judgment. Mediæval, too, is the
coarseness of the scene in Auerbach's cellar; and the _chanson
gothique_, about the King of Thule, sounds as if it had come to the
composer as a reminiscence from some previous state of existence, so
marvellous is the power of the quaint and weird melody to transport the
spirit back to a musty and hierarchic world with walled towns and narrow
streets, with terrorism and torture-chambers, with crusades and
knight-errantry, with impossible heights of holiness and unimaginable
depths of diabolism. But not to any of the defects or qualities rooted
in the composer's mediævalism must we look for the popularity which the
work acquired in this country some thirty-four years after the original
production in Paris and has retained ever since. What the general public
enjoys is the superb peasants' chorus near the beginning, the
arrangement of the Rácoczy March, which is the finest piece of military
music in existence, the chorus and dance of sylphs, Margaret's Romance,
and Mephistopheles' Serenade. Perhaps, too, a good many of them take a
sort of unregenerate pleasure in the rat and flea songs, while at heart
disapproving of such things, and of course they like the ballad of the
King of Thule, because no one who is musical at all can entirely fail to
perceive the charm of that wonderful melody. It appeals to plenty of
listeners who have no idea that there is anything Gothic or mediæval
about it.
[Sidenote: =The Centenary Celebrations.=
_December 10, 1903._]
Berlioz was the Columbus of music; he discovered the New World. By his
theory and practice of orchestration he so greatly enlarged and enriched
the resources of tone that all contemporary and subsequent composers
capable of understanding his message experienced an immense
exhilaration--a sense that new and hitherto undreamed-of possibilities
were opening out before them. The starting-point of his momentous
voyages was the idea of what is called "programme music." Like Wagner,
he perceived that after Beethoven symphonic music could do no more on
the old lines, but that music might learn to characterise much more
sharply than it had ever done before. His prodigious reform,
enlargement, and enrichment of orchestration was entirely carried out
under the influence of the desire for stronger and finer
characterisation, for a more varied and interesting play of emotion and
graphic suggestion. A good many musicians and music-lovers at the
present day, recognising the enormous merit of Berlioz's achievement in
orchestration, yet consider that, like Moses, he was not allowed to
enter the promised land to which he had led his people; or, more
literally, that Berlioz was not able to make really good use of his own
discoveries, the importance of which is to be recognised in the music of
Wagner, Dvoràk, Tchaïkovsky, and others who learned from Berlioz, rather
than in his own music. While admitting that later men, such as those
mentioned, have used the Berlioz instrument to a more spiritual kind of
purpose or with greater epic and dramatic significance, the open-minded
music-lover can scarcely deny that the compositions of Berlioz,
considered as absolute works of art, include a majestic array of
masterpieces. Such things as the "Te Deum" and "Messe des Morts" bear,
in their unparalleled vastness of conception, the stamp of an
imagination comparable only to Michel Angelo's. They are mighty
fragments of larger works never carried out--impossible to be carried
out. The best-known work by Berlioz--and the most perfect, on the whole,
of the extended works--is the "Faust," which must not be judged as an
operatic version of Goethe's "Faust," but rather as a musical setting of
the "Faust" story in the racy and drastic manner of the mediæval puppet
plays, Goethe's drama being only used in so far as it affords
suggestions for scenes of the well-salted and drastic animation that
Berlioz loved. Berlioz was a typical French Romantic. His music is
absolutely wanting in the ethical element that is so strong in Bach and
Beethoven. But he had a powerful and truly poetic sense of the
wonderful, the beautiful, the weird, and the characteristic. Over and
over again in his "Faust" he achieves typical excellence. That rapture
of spring which is one of the great, imperishable poetic themes has
nowhere in music been better rendered than in the first pages of "Faust"
(orchestra and tenor voice), and the ensuing peasant choruses are by far
the best musical expression of that "sunburnt mirth" which outside the
world of art is only possible under a southern sky. The Rácoczy March as
orchestrated by Berlioz is not only the finest piece of military music
in the world but is an immeasureably long way ahead of the next best
piece. The energy, gaiety, and tumultuous eloquence of the final section
(altogether Berlioz's own, of course), give us the musical symbol of "La
Gloire"--that important conception which has played a part in history
for three centuries. The scene on the banks of the Elbe is woven of
moonbeams and gossamer fancies that no other composer could have
handled. The rhythm of the Mephisto serenade is too good for this world.
Here the composer succeeds in expressing the diabolical without any
direct suggestion of malice--simply by creating the rhythm and accent of
laughter too monstrously whole-hearted and full-blooded for a mere man.
Another miracle is the "Chanson Gothique" (about the King of Thule),
which is, as it were, the distilled essence of all mediæval romances
about lovesick maidens looking forth from their casements. In the latter
part the composer falls a victim to his evil genius--the _macabre_,--and
the terrible squint of the madman is perceptible in the "Ride to the
Abyss" and the howling and gibbering of demons, which entirely lack the
significance of the demons in "Gerontius," and simply show us the
composer indulging his taste for the grotesque horrors of the old
miracle plays. The latter part of the composition should not be taken
too seriously. Even in the early part there is one example of the
composer's peculiar fondness for guying the offices of religion. But
this, too, should be lightly passed over and forgiven in consideration
of the feast that the work as a whole offers to the imagination and the
bracing salt wind of the composer's manly and affirmative genius.