Berlioz

The course of time, that has made so many musicians recede from us and

dwindle, has brought Berlioz the closer to us and shown him great. The

age in which he lived, the decades that followed his death, found him

unsubstantial enough. They recognized in him only the projector of

gigantic edifices, not the builder. His music seemed scaffolding only.

Though a generation of musicians learned from him, came to listen to the

proper voices of the instruments of the orchestra because of him, though

music became increasingly pictural, ironic, concrete because he had

labored, his own work still appeared ugly with unrealized intentions. If

he obtained at all as an artist, it was because of his frenetic

romanticism, his bizarreness, his Byronic postures, traits that were

after all minor and secondary enough in him. For those were the only of

his characteristics that his hour could understand. All others it

ignored. And so Berlioz remained for half a century simply the composer

of the extravagant "Symphonic Fantastique" and the brilliant "Harold in

Italy," and, for the rest, a composer of brittle and arid works, barren

of authentic ideas, "a better litterateur than musician." However, with

the departure of the world from out the romantic house, Berlioz has

rapidly recovered. Music of his that before seemed ugly has gradually

come to have force and significance. Music of his that seemed thin and

gray has suddenly become satisfactory and red. Composers as eminent as

Richard Strauss, conductors as conservative as Weingärtner, critics as

sensitive as Romain Rolland have come to perceive his vast strength and

importance, to express themselves concerning him in no doubtful

language. It is as though the world had had to move to behold Berlioz,

and that only in a day germane to him and among the men his kin could he

assume the stature rightfully his, and live.

For we exist to-day in a time of barbarian inroads. We are beholding the

old European continent of music swarmed over by Asiatic hordes, Scyths

and Mongols and Medes and Persians, all the savage musical tribes. Once

more the old arbitrary barrier between the continents is disappearing,

and the classic traits of the West are being mingled with those of the

subtle, sensuous, spiritual East. It is as if the art of music, with its

new scales, its new harmonies, its new coloring, its new rhythmical

life, were being revolutionized, as if it were returning to its

beginnings. It is as if some of the original impulse to make music were

reawakening. And so, through this confusion, Berlioz has suddenly flamed

with significance. For he himself was the rankest of barbarians. A work

like the "Requiem" has no antecedents. It conforms to no accepted

canon, seems to obey no logic other than that of the rude and powerful

mind that cast it forth. For the man who could write music so crude, so

sheerly strong, so hurtling, music innocent of past or tradition, the

world must indeed have been in the first day of its creation. For such a

one forms must indeed have had their pristine and undulled edge and

undiminished bulk, must have insisted themselves sharply and

compellingly. The music has all the uncouthness of a direct and

unquestioning response to such a vision. Little wonder that it was

unacceptable to a silver and romantic epoch. The romanticists had

aspired to paint vast canvases, too. But the vastness of their canvases

had remained a thing of intention, a thing of large and pretentious

decoration. Berlioz's music was both too rude and too stupendous for

their tastes. And, in truth, to us as well, who have felt the great

cubical masses of the moderns and have heard the barbarian tread, the

sense of beauty that demanded the giant blocks of the "Requiem" music

seems still a little a strange and monstrous thing. It seems indeed an

atavism, a return to modes of feeling that created the monuments of

other ages, of barbarous and forgotten times. Well did Berlioz term his

work "Babylonian and Ninevitish"! Certainly it is like nothing so much

as the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer, vast tombs and ramparts and

terraces of Khorsabad and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun of

Assyria. Berlioz must have harbored some elemental demand for form

inherent in the human mind but buried and forgotten until it woke to

life in him again. For there is a truly primitive and savage power in

the imagination that could heap such piles of music, revel in the

shattering fury of trumpets, upbuild choragic pyramids. Here, before

Strawinsky and Ornstein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbarous

and radical and revolutionary, a music beside which so much of modern

music dwindles.

It has, primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of

contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years

there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and

fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of

"Pelléas et Mélisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and

Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the

one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second through a

Gothic severity, the third through a machine-like regularity, to give

their work a new boldness, a new power and incisiveness of design.

Something of the same sharpness and sheerness was attained by Berlioz,

if not precisely by their means, at least to a degree no less remarkable

than theirs. He attained it through the nakedness of his melodic line.

The music of the "Requiem" is almost entirely a singularly powerful and

characteristic line. It is practically unsupported. Many persons

pretend that Berlioz wanted a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint.

Certainly his feeling for harmony was a very rudimentary one, in nowise

refined beyond that of his predecessors, very simple when compared to

that of his contemporaries, Chopin and Schumann. And his attempts at

creating counterpoint, judged from the first movement of "Harold in

Italy," are clumsy enough. But it is questionable whether this ignorance

did not stand him in good stead rather than in bad; and whether, in the

end, he did not make himself fairly independent of both these musical

elements. For the "Requiem" attains a new sort of musical grandeur from

its sharp, heavy, rectangular, rhythmically powerful melodic line. It

voices through it a bold, naked, immense language. With Baudelaire,

Berlioz could have said, "L'énergie c'est le grâce suprême." For the

beauty of this his masterpiece lies in just the delineating power, the

characteristic of this crude, vigorous, unadorned melody. Doubtless to

those still baffled by its nudity, his music appears thin. But if it is

at all thin, its thinness is that of the steel cable.

And it has the rhythmical vivacity and plenitude that characterizes the

newest musical art. If there is one quality that unites in a place apart

the Strawinskys and Ornsteins, the Blochs and Scriabines, it is the

fearlessness and exuberance and savagery with which they pound out

their rhythms. Something long buried in us seems to arise at the

vibration of these fierce, bold, clattering, almost convulsive strokes,

to seek to gesticulate and dance and leap. And Berlioz possessed this

elemental feeling for rhythm. Schumann was convinced on hearing the

"Symphonie Fantastique" that in Berlioz music was returning to its

beginnings, to the state where rhythm was unconstrained and irregular,

and that in a short while it would overthrow the laws which had bound it

so long. So, too, it seems to us, despite all the rhythmical innovations

of our time. The personality that could beat out exuberantly music as

rhythmically various and terse and free must indeed have possessed a

primitive naïveté and vitality and spontaneity of impulse. What

manifestation of unbridled will in that freedom of expression! Berlioz

must have been blood-brother to the savage, the elemental creature who

out of the dark and hidden needs of life itself invents on his rude

musical instrument a mighty rhythm. Or, he must have been like a

powerful and excited steed, chafing his bit, mad to give his energy

rein. His blood must forever have been craving the liberation of turgid

and angular and irregular beats, must forever have been crowding his

imagination with new and compelling combinations, impelling him to the

movements of leaping and marching. For he seems to have found in

profusion the accents that quicken and lift and lance, found them in

all varieties, from the brisk and delicate steps of the ballets in "La

Damnation de Faust" to the large, far-flung momentum that drives the

choruses of the "Requiem" mountain high; from the mad and riotous

finales of the "Harold" symphony and the "Symphonie Fantastique" to the

red, turbulent and _canaille_ march rhythms, true music of insurgent

masses, clangorous with echoes of tocsins and barricades and

revolutions.

But it is in his treatment of his instrument that Berlioz seems most

closely akin to the newest musicians. For he was the first to permit the

orchestra to dictate music to him. There had, no doubt, existed skilful

and sensitive orchestrators before him, men who were deeply aware of the

nature of their tools, men who, like Mozart, could scarcely repress

their tears at the sound of a favorite instrument, and wrote marvelously

for flutes and horns and oboes and all the components of their bands.

But matched with his, their knowledge of the instrument was patently

relative. For, with them, music had on the whole a general timbre.

Phrases which they assigned, say, to violins or flutes can be assigned

to other instruments without doing the composition utter damage. But in

the works of Berlioz music and instruments are inseparable. One cannot

at all rearrange his orchestration. Though the phrases that he has

written for bassoon or clarinet might imaginably be executed by other

instruments, the music would perish utterly in the substitution. What

instrument but the viola could appreciate the famous "Harold" theme? For

just as in a painting of Cézanne's the form is inseparable from the

color, is, indeed, one with it, so, too, in the works of Berlioz and the

moderns the form is part of the sensuous quality of the band. When

Rimsky-Korsakoff uttered the pronouncement that a composition for

orchestra could not exist before the orchestration was completed, he was

only phrasing a rule upon which Berlioz had acted all his life. For

Berlioz set out to learn the language of the orchestra. Not only did he

call for new instruments, instruments that have eventually become

integral portions of the modern bands, but he devoted himself to a study

of the actual natures and ranges and qualities of the old, and wrote the

celebrated treatise that has become the textbook of the science of

instrumentation. The thinness of much of his work, the feebleness of the

overture to "Benvenuto Cellini," for instance, results from his

inexperience in the new tongue. But he had not to practise long. It was

not long before he became the teacher of his very contemporaries. Wagner

owes as much to Berlioz's instrumentation as he owes to Chopin's

harmony.

But for the new men, he is more than teacher. For them he is like the

discoverer of a new continent. Through him they have come to find a new

fashion of apprehending the world. Out of the paint-box that he opened,

they have drawn the colors that make us see anew in their music the face

of the earth. The tone-poems of Debussy and the ballets of Ravel and

Strawinsky, the scintillating orchestral compositions of Strauss and

Rimsky and Bloch, could scarcely have come to be had not Berlioz called

the attention of the world to the instruments in which the colors and

timbres in which it is steeped, lie dormant.

And so the large and powerful and contained being that, after all, was

Berlioz has come to appreciation. For behind the fiery, the volcanic

Berlioz, behind the Byronic and fantastical composer, there was always

another, greater man. The history of the art of Berlioz is the history

of the gradual incarnation of that calm and majestic being, the gradual

triumph of that grander personality over the other, up to the final

unclosing and real presence in "Roméo" and the "Mass for the Dead." The

wild romanticist, the lover of the strange and the lurid and the

grotesque who created the "Symphonic Fantastique," never, perhaps,

became entirely abeyant. And some of the salt and flavor of Berlioz's

greater, more characteristic works, the tiny musical particles, for

instance, that compose the "Queen Mab" scherzo in "Roméo," or the

bizarre combination of flutes and trombones in the "Requiem," macabre as

the Orcagna frescoes in Pisa, are due his fantastical imaginings. But,

gradually, the deeper Berlioz came to predominate. That deeper spirit

was a being that rose out of a vast and lovely cavern of the human soul,

and was clothed in stately and in shining robes. It was a spirit that

could not readily build itself out into the world, so large and simple

it was, and had to wait long before it could find a worthy portal. It

managed only to express itself partially, fragmentarily, in various

transformations, till, by change, it found in the idea of the Mass for

the Dead its fitting opportunity. Still, it was never entirely absent

from the art of Berlioz, and in the great clear sense of it gained in

the "Requiem" we can perceive its various and ever-present

substantiations, from the very beginning of his career.

It is in the overture to "King Lear" already, in that noble and gracious

introduction. From the very beginning, Berlioz revealed himself a proud

and aristocratic spirit. Even in his most helpless moments, he is always

noble. He shows himself possessed of a hatred for all that is unjust and

ungirt and vulgar. There is always a largeness and gravity and chastity

in his gesture. The coldness is most often simply the apparent coldness

of restraint; the baldness, the laconism of a spirit that abhorred

loose, ungainly manners of speech. Even the frenetic and orgiastic

finales of the "Harold" and "Fantastic" symphonies are tempered by an

athletic steeliness and irony, are pervaded, after all, by the good dry

light of the intellect. The greater portion of the "Harold" is

obviously, in its coolness and neatness and lightness, the work of one

who was unwilling to dishevel himself in the cause of expression, who

outlined his sensations reticently rather than effusively, and stood

always a little apart. The "Corsair" overture has not the wild, rich

balladry of that of the "Flying Dutchman," perhaps. But it is full of

the clear and quivering light of the Mediterranean. It is, in the words

of Hans von Bülow, "as terse as the report of a pistol." And it flies

swiftly before a wind its own. The mob-scenes in "Benvenuto Cellini" are

bright and brisk and sparkling, and compare not unfavorably with certain

passages in "Petrouchka." And, certainly, "Roméo" manifests

unforgettably the fineness and nobility of Berlioz's temper. "The music

he writes for his love scenes," some one has remarked, "is the best test

of a musician's character." For, in truth, no type of musical expression

gives so ample an opportunity to all that is latently vulgar in him to

produce itself. And one has but to compare the "Garden Scene" of "Roméo"

with two other pieces of music related to it in style, the second act of

"Tristan" and the "Romeo" of Tchaikowsky, to perceive in how gracious a

light Berlioz's music reveals him. Wagner's powerful music hangs over

the garden of his lovers like an oppressive and sultry night. Foliage

and streams and the very moonlight pulsate with the fever of the blood.

But there is no tenderness, no youth, no delicacy, no grace in Wagner's

love-passages. Tchaikowsky's, too, is predominantly lurid and sensual.

And while Wagner's at least is full of animal richness, Tchaikowsky's is

morbid and hysterical and perverse, sets us amid the couches and

draperies and pink lampshades instead of out under the night-time sky.

Berlioz's, however, is full of a still and fragrant poesy. His is the

music of Shakespeare's lovers indeed. It is like the opening of hearts

dumb with the excess of joy. It has all the high romance, all the

ecstasy of the unspoiled spirit. For Berlioz seems to have possessed

always his candor and his youth. Through three hundred years men have

turned toward Shakespeare's play, with its Italian night and its balcony

above the fruit-tree tops, in wonder at its youthful loveliness, its

delicate picture of first love. In Berlioz's music, at last, it found a

worthy rival. For the musician, too, had within him some of the

graciousness and highness and sweetness of spirit the poet manifested so

sovereignly.

But it is chiefly in the "Requiem" that Berlioz revealed himself in all

the grandeur and might of his being. For in it all the aristocratic

coolness and terseness of "La Damnation de Faust" and of "Harold en

Italie," all the fresco-like calm of "Les Troyens à Carthage," find

their freest, richest expression. "Were I to be threatened with the

destruction of all that I have ever composed," wrote Berlioz on the eve

of his death, "it would be for that work that I would beg life." And he

was correct in the estimation of its value. It is indeed one of the

great edifices of tone. For the course of events which demanded of

Berlioz the work had supplied him with a function commensurate with his

powers, and permitted him to register himself immortally. He was called

by his country to write a mass for a commemoration service in the church

of the Invalides. That gold-domed building, consecrated to the memory of

the host of the fallen, to the countless soldiers slain in the wars of

the monarchy and the republic and the empire, and soon to become the

tomb of Napoleon, had need of its officiant. And so the genius of

Berlioz arose and came. The "Requiem" is the speech of a great and

classic soul, molded by the calm light and fruitful soil of the

Mediterranean. For all its "Babylonian and Ninevitish" bulk, it is full

of the Latin calm, the Latin repose, the Latin resignation. The simple

tone, quiet for all its energy, the golden sweetness of the "Sanctus,"

the naked acceptance of all the facts of death, are the language of one

who had within him an attitude at once primitive and grand, an attitude

that we have almost come to ignore. Listening to the Mass, we find

ourselves feeling as though some _vates_ of a Mediterranean folk were

come in rapt and lofty mood to offer sacrifice, to pacify the living, to

celebrate with fitting rites the unnumbered multitudes of the heroic

dead. There are some compositions that seem to find the common ground

of all men throughout the ages. And to the company of such works of art,

the grand Mass for the Dead of Hector Berlioz belongs.

Still, the commission to write the "Requiem" was but a momentary

welcoming extended to Berlioz. The age in which he lived was unprepared

for his art. It found itself better prepared for Wagner. For Wagner's

was nearer the older music, summed it up, in fact. So Berlioz had to

remain uncomprehended and unhoused. And when there finally came a time

for the music of Wagner to retreat, and another to take its place,

Berlioz was still half-buried under the misunderstanding of his time.

And yet, with the Kassandra of Eulenberg, Berlioz could have said at the

moment when it seemed as though eternal night were about to obscure him

forever:

"Einst treibt der Frühling uns in neuer Blüthe

Empor ans Licht; Leben, wir scheiden nicht,

Denn ewig bleibet, was in uns erglühte

Und drängt sich ewig wieder auf zum Licht!"

For the likeness so many of the new men bear him has provided us with a

wonderful instance of the eternal recurrence of things.