So he spoke to Legouvé; and he sat down on a stone in a Paris street, and wept. In the meantime, the old lady did not understand this foolishness; she hardly tolerated it, and sought to undeceive him.

He was a little child grown old, and felt bewildered and miserable and frightened before the thought of death.

Wagner, at the same age, a victor, worshipped, flattered, and—if we are to believe the Bayreuth legend—crowned with prosperity; Wagner, sad and suffering, doubting his achievements, feeling the inanity of his bitter fight against the mediocrity of the world, had "fled far from the world"[49] and thrown himself into religion; and when a friend looked at him in surprise as he was saying grace at table, he answered: "Yes, I believe in my Saviour."[50]

But of the two deaths, how much sadder is that of the artist who was without a faith, and who had neither strength nor stoicism enough to be happy without one; who slowly died in that little room in the rue de Calais amid the distracting noise of an indifferent and even hostile Paris;[51] who shut himself up in savage silence; who saw no loved face bending over him in his last moments; who had not the comfort of belief in his work;[52] who could not think calmly of what he had done, nor look proudly back over the road he had trodden, nor rest content in the thought of a life well lived; and who began and closed his Mémoires with Shakespeare's gloomy words, and repeated them when dying:—

Such was the unhappy and irresolute heart that found itself united to one of the most daring geniuses in the world. It is a striking example of the difference that may exist between genius and greatness—for the two words are not synonymous. When one speaks of greatness, one speaks of greatness of soul, nobility of character, firmness of will, and, above all, balance of mind. I can understand how people deny the existence of these qualities in Berlioz; but to deny his musical genius, or to cavil about his wonderful power—and that is what they do daily in Paris—is lamentable and ridiculous. Whether he attracts one or not, a thimbleful of some of his work, a single part in one of his works, a little bit of the Fantastique or the overture of Benvenuto, reveal more genius—I am not afraid to say it—than all the French music of his century. I can understand people arguing about him in a country that produced Beethoven and Bach; but with us in France, who can we set up against him? Gluck and César Franck were much greater men, but they were never geniuses of his stature. If genius is a creative force, I cannot find more than four or five geniuses in the world who rank above him. When I have named Beethoven, Mozart, Bach,Händel, and Wagner, I do not know who else is superior to Berlioz; I do not even know who is his equal.

He is not only a musician, he is music itself. He does not command his familiar spirit, he is its slave. Those who know his writings know how he was simply possessed and exhausted by his musical emotions. They were really fits of ecstasy or convulsions. At first "there was feverish excitement; the veins beat violently and tears flowed freely. Then came spasmodic contractions of the muscles, total numbness of the feet and hands, and partial paralysis of the nerves of sight and hearing; he saw nothing, heard nothing; he was giddy and half faint." And in the case of music that displeased him, he suffered, on the contrary, from "a painful sense of bodily disquiet and even from nausea."[54]

The possession that music held over his nature shows itself clearly in the sudden outbreak of his genius.[55] His family opposed the idea of his becoming a musician; and until he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old his weak will sulkily gave way to their wishes. In obedience to his father he began his studies in medicine at Paris. One evening he heard Les Danaïdes of Salieri. It came upon him like a thunderclap. He ran to the Conservatoire library and read Gluck's scores.

He forgot to eat and drink; he was like a man in a frenzy. A performance of Iphigénie en Tauride finished him. He studied under Lesueur and then at the Conservatoire. The following year, 1827, he composed Les Francs-Juges; two years afterwards the Huit scènes de Faust, which was the nucleus of the future Damnation;[56] three years afterwards, the Symphonie fantastique (commenced in 1830).[57] And he had not yet got the Prix de Rome! Add to this that in 1828 he had already ideas for Roméo et Juliette, and that he had written a part of Lelio in 1829. Can one find elsewhere a more dazzling musical debut? Compare that of Wagner who, at the same age, was shyly writing Les Fées, Défense d'aimer, and Rienzi.

He wrote them at the same age, but ten years later; for Les Fées appeared in 1833, when Berlioz had already written the Fantastique, the Huit scènes de Faust, Lelio, and Harold; Rienzi was only played in 1842, after Benvenuto (1835), Le Requiem (1837), Roméo (1839), La Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840)—that is to say, when Berlioz had finished all his great works, and after he had achieved his musical revolution. And that revolution was effected alone, without a model, without a guide. What could he have heard beyond the operas of Gluck and Spontini while he was at the Conservatoire? At the time when he composed the Ouverture des Francs-Juges even the name of Weber was unknown to him,[58] and of Beethoven's compositions he had only heard an andante.[59]

Truly, he is a miracle and the most startling phenomenon in the history of nineteenth-century music. His audacious power dominates all his age; and in the face of such a genius, who would not follow Paganini's example, and hail him as Beethoven's only successor?[60] Who does not see what a poor figure the young Wagner cut at that time, working away in laborious and self-satisfied mediocrity? But Wagner soon made up for lost ground; for he knew what he wanted, and he wanted it obstinately.

The zenith of Berlioz's genius was reached, when he was thirty-five years old, with the Requiem and Roméo. They are his two most important works, and are two works about which one may feel very differently. For my part, I am very fond of the one, and I dislike the other; but both of them open up two great new roads in art, and both are placed like two gigantic arches on the triumphal way of the revolution that Berlioz started. I will return to the subject of these works later.

But Berlioz was already getting old. His daily cares and stormy domestic life,[61] his disappointments and passions, his commonplace and often degrading work, soon wore him out and, finally, exhausted his power. "Would you believe it?" he wrote to his friend Ferrand, "that which used to stir me to transports of musical passion now fills me with indifference, or even disdain. I feel as if I were descending a mountain at a great rate. Life is so short; I notice that thoughts of the end have been with me for some time past." In 1848, at forty-five years old, he wrote in his Mémoires: "I find myself so old and tired and lacking inspiration." At forty-five years old, Wagner had patiently worked out his theories and was feeling his power; at forty-five he was writing Tristan and The Music of the Future. Abused by critics, unknown to the public, "he remained calm, in the belief that he would be master of the musical world in fifty years' time."[62]

Berlioz was disheartened. Life had conquered him. It was not that he had lost any of his artistic mastery; on the contrary, his compositions became more and more finished; and nothing in his earlier work attained the pure beauty of some of the pages of L'Enfance du Christ (1850-4), or of Les Troyens(1855-63). But he was losing his power; and his intense feeling, his revolutionary ideas, and his inspiration (which in his youth had taken the place of the confidence he lacked) were failing him. He now lived on the past—the Huit scènes de Faust (1828) held the germs of La Damnation de Faust (1846); since 1833, he had been thinking of Béatrice et Bénédict (1862); the ideas in Les Troyens were inspired by his childish worship of Virgil, and had been with him all his life. But with what difficulty he now finished his task! He had only taken seven months to write Roméo, and "on account of not being able to write the Requiem fast enough, he had adopted a kind of musical shorthand";[63] but he took seven or eight years to write Les Troyens, alternating between moods of enthusiasm and disgust, and feeling indifference and doubt about his work. He groped his way hesitatingly and unsteadily; he hardly understood what he was doing. He admired the more mediocre pages of his work: the scene of the Laocoon, the finale of the last act of the Les Troyens à Troie, the last scene with Aeneas in Les Troyens à Carthage.[64] The empty pomposities of Spontini mingle with the loftiest conceptions. One might say that his genius became a stranger to him: it was the mechanical work of an unconscious force, like "stalactites in a dripping grotto." He had no impetus. It was only a matter of time before the roof of the grotto would give way. One is struck with the mournful despair with which he works; it is his last will and testament that he is making. And when he has finished it, he will have finished everything. His work is ended; if he lived another hundred years he would not have the heart to add anything more to it. The only thing that remains—and it is what he is about to do—is to wrap himself in silence and die.

II

Berlioz's work did not spread itself evenly over his life; it was accomplished in a few years. It was not like the course of a great river, as with Wagner and Beethoven; it was a burst of genius, whose flames lit up the whole sky for a little while, and then died gradually down.[65] Let me try to tell you about this wonderful blaze.

Some of Berlioz's musical qualities are so striking that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them here. His instrumental colouring, so intoxicating and exciting,[66] his extraordinary discoveries concerning timbre, his inventions of new nuances (as in the famous combining of flutes and trombones in the Hostias et preces of the Requiem, and the curious use of the harmonics of violins and harps), and his huge and nebulous orchestra—all this lends itself to the most subtle expression of thought.[67]

Think of the effect that such works must have produced at that period. Berlioz was the first to be astonished when he heard them for the first time. At the Ouverture des Francs-Juges he wept and tore his hair, and fell sobbing on the kettledrums. At the performance of his Tuba mirum, in Berlin, he nearly fainted. The composer who most nearly approached him was Weber, and, as we have already seen, Berlioz only knew him late in life. But how much less rich and complex is Weber's music, in spite of its nervous brilliance and dreaming poetry. Above all, Weber is much more mundane and more of a classicist; he lacks Berlioz's revolutionary passion and plebeian force; he is less expressive and less grand.

Berlioz taught himself. He used to read the score of an opera while it was being performed.

That he was an originator in this direction no one doubts. And no one disputes, as a rule, "his devilish cleverness," as Wagner scornfully called it, or remains insensible to his skill and mastery in the mechanism of expression, and his power over sonorous matter, which make him, apart from his creative power, a sort of magician of music, a king of tone and rhythm. This gift is recognised even by his enemies—by Wagner, who seeks with some unfairness to restrict his genius within narrow limits, and to reduce it to "a structure with wheels of infinite ingenuity and extreme cunning ... a marvel of mechanism."[70]

But though there is hardly anyone that Berlioz does not irritate or attract, he always strikes people by his impetuous ardour, his glowing romance, and his seething imagination, all of which makes and will continue to make his work one of the most picturesque mirrors of his age. His frenzied force of ecstasy and despair, his fulness of love and hatred, his perpetual thirst for life, which "in the heart of the deepest sorrow lights the Catherine wheels and crackers of the wildest joy"[71]—these are the qualities that stir up the crowds in Benvenuto and the armies in the Damnation, that shake earth, heaven, and hell, and are never quenched, but remain devouring and "passionate even when the subject is far removed from passion, and yet also express sweet and tender sentiments and the deepest calm."[72]

And I shall not dwell on Berlioz's love of Nature, which, as M. Prudhomme shows us, is the soul of a composition like the Damnation and, one might say, of all great compositions. No musician, with the exception of Beethoven, has loved Nature so profoundly. Wagner himself did not realise the intensity of emotion which she roused in Berlioz,[73] and how this feeling impregnated the music of the Damnation, of Roméo, and of Les Troyens.

But this genius had other characteristics which are less well known, 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]

Before this, Berlioz had written in 1864:—

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]

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.

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.

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]

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.

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:—

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.

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 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.

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]

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.

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:—

Far from objecting to this, Schumann sees in it something necessary to musical evolution.

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]

Remark also Berlioz's freedom of melody. His musical phrases pulse and flow like life itself. "Some phrases taken separately," says Schumann, "have such an intensity that they will not bear harmonising—as in many ancient folk-songs—and often even an accompaniment spoils their fulness."[89] These melodies so correspond with the emotions, that they reproduce the least thrills of body and mind by their vigorous workings-up and delicate reliefs, by splendid barbarities of modulation and strong and glowing colour, by gentle gradations of light and shade or imperceptible ripples of thought, which flow over the body like a steady tide. It is an art of peculiar sensitiveness, more delicately expressive than that of Wagner; not satisfying itself with the modern tonality, but going back to old modes—a rebel, as M. Saint-Saëns remarks, to the polyphony which had governed music since Bach's day, and which is perhaps, after all, "a heresy destined to disappear."[90]

How much finer, to my idea, are Berlioz's recitatives, with their long and winding rhythms,[91] thanWagner's declamations, which—apart from the climax of a subject, where the air breaks into bold and vigorous phrases, whose influence elsewhere is often weak—limit themselves to the quasi-notation of spoken inflections, and jar noisily against the fine harmonies of the orchestra. Berlioz's orchestration, too, is of a more delicate temper, and has a freer life than Wagner's, flowing in an impetuous stream, and sweeping away everything in its course; it is also less united and solid, but more flexible; its nature is undulating and varied, and the thousand imperceptible impulses of the spirit and of action are reflected there. It is a marvel of spontaneity and caprice.

In spite of appearances, Wagner is a classicist compared with Berlioz; he carried on and perfected the work of the German classicists; he made no innovations; he is the pinnacle and the close of one evolution of art. Berlioz began a new art; and one finds in it all the daring and gracious ardour of youth. The iron laws that bound the art of Wagner are not to be found in Berlioz's early works, which give one the illusion of perfect freedom.[92]