first and foremost," says one critic, "as a master of orchestration,
perhaps the most ingenious and versatile among all modern
composers";[34] and another ranks him with Beethoven, Wagner, and
Dvořák as "one of the four greatest masters of instrumentation the
world has ever seen."[35] Unfortunately even in this department he
could not entirely resist that craving for sensationalism which was the
characteristic vice of his temperament; so that his name has become
associated in many minds with merely noisy or eccentric effects that
are far from representing him at his best. He loved to pile Pelion
upon Ossa, scored his Requiem for sixteen trombones, sixteen trumpets,
five ophicleides, twelve horns, eight pairs of kettle-drums, two bass
drums, and a gong, in addition to the usual resources, and told with
pride of its having frightened one of the listeners into a fit. He was
frequently rallied for what Mr. Nordau would call his "megalomania."
"Prince Metternich," he tells us in his memoirs, "said to me one day:
'Are you not the man, monsieur, who composes music for five hundred
performers?' To which I replied: 'Not always, monseigneur; I sometimes
write for four hundred and fifty.'"
Love of the bizarre and the unusual led him often to employ rare
instruments, or to use the ordinary ones in freakish ways. The harp,
the English horn, and the cornet figure frequently in his scores, and
he likes to direct that the horns be put in bags, that the cymbal be
suspended and struck with a stick, that the drums be played with sticks
covered with sponge. In one instance he ventures a duet between a
piccolo and a bass trombone. He describes, in a letter from Germany,
a trick by which a trombone player sounds four tones at once, and
adds in all seriousness: "Acousticians ought to explain this new
phenomenon in the resonance of sonorous tubes; we musicians ought
to study it thoroughly and turn it to account when the opportunity
presents itself." He was one of the earliest and most indefatigable
champions of the valve horns and trumpets made by Sax of Paris, and
also, by a less happy inspiration, made propaganda for the _cornet à
pistons_, which is in comparison with its noble cousin, the trumpet,
a most vulgar instrument. He was a daring, but not always a cautious,
innovator, frequently seeming to set a higher value upon novelty than
upon inherent worth.
[Illustration: score]
[Illustration: score]
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."
On the other hand, if he was in some degree forced into the dramatic
vein by deficiencies on the musical side, he had also some strong
positive qualifications for the work he undertook. A degree of literary
cultivation rare among musicians gave him a large choice of motives to
draw upon. The symphony, "Romeo and Juliet," the overture, "King Lear,"
the opera, "Beatrice and Benedict," the "Tempest" fantasia in "Lelio,"
and some minor pieces, all owe their inspiration to Shakespeare; Byron
is drawn upon for the "Corsair" overture and the symphony, "Harold in
Italy," and Scott for the overtures, "Waverley" and "Rob Roy"; Goethe
for "The Damnation of Faust"; the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
for the overture which bears his name, and Virgil's "Æneid" for the
opera, "The Trojans at Carthage." It is true that both in his choice
and his utilization of texts he was often characteristically perverse.
He considered Thomas Moore one of the great pathetic poets of the
world; he garbled "Romeo and Juliet"; he placed Faust in Hungary in
order to introduce the Rakoczy March; he made the demons in "Faust"
sing in Swedenborg's infernal language--"_Irimiru Karabrao! Has! Has!
Tradioun Marexil firtrudinxé burrudixé_" ...; in his own programs he
perpetrated, with entire gravity, the most mirth-provoking medleys of
the sublime and the ridiculous. Yet in spite of his lack of humor, and
even at times of ordinary common sense, he brought to the planning and
execution of his fantastic conceptions an extraordinary cleverness.
Berlioz is, however, even as a dramatist, open to severe criticism,
the nature of which is again suggested by Wagner. In pointing out
that in the absence of a purely musical thread one has to hold on to
"scenic motives not present to the eye, nor even so much as indicated
in the program," Wagner touches upon one of the ineradicable defects
of all program-music, its ambiguity. Doubtless it is quite possible,
and mildly amusing, to follow, on hearing the "Symphonie Fantastique,"
the general outlines of the story, but did Berlioz suppose that
any one would be able to recognize in his music, otherwise often
unintelligible, the details of the "plot"? If so, he was certainly
overrating the descriptive powers of sound, and placing too much
dependence on the definiteness of a medium which is by nature vague
and indeterminate. He was himself conscious of the difficulty; but
with his usual arrogance he attributed it, not to any shortcoming in
his own art, but to his audience's lack of imagination. To the sixth
division of the score of "Romeo and Juliet" he appends this foot-note:
"The public has no imagination; pieces which address themselves
solely to the imagination have consequently no public. The following
instrumental scene is in this predicament, and I think it should be
suppressed except when the symphony is to be heard by an audience
of the élite, to whom the fifth act of Shakespeare's tragedy, with
Garrick's dénoûement, is extremely familiar, and whose poetic sentiment
is very elevated." The thought that possibly a piece of music should
not address itself solely to the pictorial imagination does not seem to
have occurred to him.
When Berlioz's music does not fail of its effect through being
ambiguous, it is very apt to lose itself in triviality; indeed, this,
as we have already seen,[37] is one of the imminent dangers besetting
all program-music. Why is it that we are rather more inclined to smile
than to shudder at the piled-up horrors of the "Witches' Sabbath"?
Why does the elaborate machinery which Berlioz assembles in order to
stun us leave us so often rather amused or bored? Why is it that we
enjoy more than we resent that parody of his style perpetrated by
Arnal, in which we are asked "to understand from the second repetition
of the first allegro how my hero ties his cravat"? Is it not that
there is involved in the programmistic method a subtle insult to our
intelligence, that we instinctively rebel against the use of musical
tones, by nature so uniquely expressive of inner verities, for the mere
delineation of external objects? Wagner seems to think so when, in the
last part of his criticism, he says that the musician "looks quite away
from the incidents of ordinary life ... and sublimates whatever lies
within it to its quintessence of emotional-content." Bourget certainly
thinks so when he commands the artist, "_Sois belle et tais-toi_."
This highest simplicity of the great creative artist, who ignores the
accidents and the externals of life, who "looks into his heart and
writes," was just what Berlioz, with all his mobile intelligence, all
his ingenuity, all his earnest aspiration, could never achieve. There
was in him a perversity of temper, a disharmony between the emotional
and the intellectual nature, a lack of the sense of proportion or the
sense of humor, which made it impossible. The natural seemed to him
jejune; the simple, vulgar; the impulsive, crude. To be elaborate,
theatrical, calculated, was a necessity of his highly artificial
imagination. Just as in his love affairs he was never following an
unsophisticated passion, but forever masquerading as an ideal hero,
and as in his essays and autobiography he never chronicled, but always
dramatized, so in his compositions he could not bring himself to
express spontaneous intuitions in naïve forms, but built up elaborate
programs with all the ingenuity of his tireless and resourceful
intelligence. All life appeared to him as a magnificent glittering
spectacle in which he was playing a leading rôle; and whether he loved
or hated, whether he suffered or enjoyed, whether he succeeded or
failed, he hugged close to his Gallic heart the consciousness that
he was acting well, and that he had an audience. Like the firemen of
Beauvais, he had, too, the ineffable satisfaction of placarding the
heavens, in his autobiography, with the inspiring legend, "Honneur aux
victimes du devoir."
The boast in his case, nevertheless, was far from an empty one; not the
least strange element in his strangely mixed character was the real
heroism, the splendid faith, with which he clung to an artistic ideal
which was received with contempt or indifference on every side. In his
devotion to an unpopular cause, through a lifetime of difficulties, he
was a true martyr. His career, after his return from Rome to Paris in
1832, was one long uphill fight, not only for recognition, but for a
bare livelihood. His accounts of his hated labors as a feuilletonist,
up to the time when, by a generous gift from Paganini, he was freed
from such servitude, are among the sincerest and most pathetic pages
in his writings. He never won the appreciation from his countrymen
that his vain, sensitive, and thoroughly Parisian nature most craved.
Realizing, about 1840, that a man is never a prophet in his own
country, he reluctantly sought abroad the support denied him at home,
and in a series of tours in Germany, Austria, Russia, and England met
with a large measure of success. Yet his first care, after each foreign
triumph, was to know "what they thought of it in Paris"--and alas! they
never thought about it at all. Tardily, in 1856, already over fifty
years old, he obtained a _fauteuil_ in the Academy, and was appointed
Librarian of the Conservatoire. But the cheering effect of this
recognition was clouded by the fiasco, in 1863, of the opera on which
he had been working for years, "Les Troyens à Carthage." This blow
broke his heart. He wrote no more, and after six years of loneliness
and ill-health, died on March 8, 1869. As so often happens, his funeral
orations contained the enthusiastic praises his living ears had craved
in vain, and he was shortly pronounced the greatest of French composers.
The faith in himself and his art, which kept him steadfast through all
his discouragements and temptations, which enabled him to persist in
a path of almost complete solitude, which armed him with the sword of
conviction and the shield of a good conscience, was, as Mr. Apthorp
says, "the one pure, sterling element in a character in which all else
was more or less distorted." He was a man of overweening vanity and
egotism, often blind to the needs of those nearest him; an uncertain
friend, a spiteful enemy, an intolerable husband; he could descend to
petty deceits and unworthy animosities, and was willing to sacrifice
the most sacred relations on the altar of his dramatic sense. And yet
he could say with truth, "The love of money has never allied itself in
a single instance with my love of art; I have always been ready to make
all sorts of sacrifices to go in search of the beautiful, and insure
myself against contact with those paltry platitudes which are crowned
by popularity." He had also many minor virtues which, if not like
this precisely heroic, are nevertheless charming. He was a sprightly
narrator, a witty and keen critic where his prejudices were not
involved, and a taster of life in whom discrimination did not embitter
good nature.
Concerning his achievement as a musician there will always be extreme
oppositions of opinion, so uncompromising was his theory of art, and
so relentless his execution of it. The ultimate problem of whether a
realism so thoroughgoing as his is justified by the nature of music
will perhaps always remain an open one. But the most recalcitrant
critic must admit the greatness of his incidental services to the
art which he practised with such headlong perversity. He was a good
iconoclast. He helped to break the bonds of a narrow conservatism which
was in danger of confining all music to the forms of the symphony and
the sonata, and to the type of expression perfected by the classicists.
By his daring imagination he abashed pedantry and opened up vistas of
new possibilities. And he was, at least in one department, that of
orchestration, a triumphant innovator. By using instruments, not in
traditional, hackneyed ways, but with an intuition of their latent
possibilities, he added permanently to the resources of all composers
and to the sensitiveness of all listeners. Whether, therefore, the
tendency of all music toward the realistic, which is so prominent
to-day, and in relation to which he stands as one of the greatest of
pioneers, shall continue indefinitely, or shall give place to some new
movement in another direction, as certain signs seem to indicate--in
any event Berlioz's place as a contributor to the unresting progress of
art is secure.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] See "Selections from Berlioz's Writings," translated by W. F.
Apthorp, New York, 1879, pp. 228-261.
[31] See the summary of the program of the "Symphonie Fantastique" at
p. 24.
[32] Full score, Breitkopf and Härtel edition, p. 54.
[33] See Introduction, p. 43.
[34] E. Dickinson, "The Study of the History of Music," p. 264.
[35] W. H. Hadow, "Studies in Modern Music," p. 141.
[36] Francis Hueffer, "Half a Century of Music in England," pp. 231-232.
[37] Introduction, p. 53.
VII
FRANZ LISZT
[Illustration: FRANZ LISZT]
VII
FRANZ LISZT