[25] In a note in the Mémoires, Berlioz publishes a letter of Mendelssohn's which protests his "good friendship," and he writes these bitter words: "I have just seen in a volume of Mendelssohn's Letters what his friendship for me consisted of. He says to his mother, in what is plainly a description of myself, '—— is a perfect caricature, without a spark of talent ... there are times when I should like to swallow him up'" (Mémoires, II, 48). Berlioz did not add that Mendelssohn also said: "They pretend that Berlioz seeks lofty ideals in art. I don't think so at all. What he wants is to get himself married." The injustice of these insulting words will disgust all those who remember that when Berlioz married Henrietta Smithson she brought as dowry nothing but debts; and that he had only three hundred francs himself, which a friend had lent him.

[26] Liszt repudiated him later.

[27] Written in an article on the Ouverture de Waverley (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik).

[28] Wagner, who had criticised Berlioz since 1840, and who published a detailed study of his works in his Oper und Drama in 1851, wrote to Liszt in 1855: "I own that it would interest me very much to make the acquaintance of Berlioz's symphonies, and I should like to see the scores. If you have them, will you lend them to me?"

[29] See Berlioz's letter, cited by J. Tiersot, Hector Berlioz et la société de son temps, p. 275.

[30] Roméo, Faust, La Nonne sanglante.

[31] I shall content myself here with noting a fact, which I shall deal with more fully in another essay at the end of this book: it is the decline of musical taste in France—and, I rather think, in all Europe—since 1835 or 1840. Berlioz says in his Mémoires: "Since the first performance of Roméo et Juliette the indifference of the French public for all that concerns art and literature has grown incredibly" (Mémoires, II, 263). Compare the shouts of excitement and the tears that were drawn from the dilettanti of 1830 (Mémoires, I, 81), at the performances of Italian operas or Gluck's works, with the coldness of the public between 1840 and 1870. A mantle of ice covered art then. How much Berlioz must have suffered. In Germany the great romantic age was dead. Only Wagner remained to give life to music; and he drained all that was left in Europe of love and enthusiasm for music. Berlioz died truly of asphyxia.

[32] Here is an official list of the towns where Benvenuto has been played since 1879 (I am indebted for this information to M. Victor Chapót, Berlioz's grandnephew). They are, in alphabetical order: Berlin, Bremen, Brunswick, Dresden, Frankfort-On-Main, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Hamburg, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Mannheim, Metz, Munich, Prague, Schwerin, Stettin, Strasburg, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Weimar.

[33] Mémoires, II, 420.

[34] "I do not know how Berlioz has managed to be cut off like this. He has neither friends nor followers; neither the warm sun of popularity nor the pleasant shade of friendship" (Liszt to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 16 May, 1861).

[35] In a letter to Bennet he says, "I am weary, I am weary...." How often does this piteous cry sound in his letters towards the end of his life. "I feel I am going to die.... I am weary unto death" (21 August, 1868—six months before his death).

[36] Letter to Asger Hammerick, 1865.

[37] Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 July, 21 September, 1862; and August, 1864.

[38] Mémoires, II, 335. He shocked Mendelssohn, and even Wagner, by his irreligion. (See Berlioz's letter to Wagner, 10 September, 1855.)

[39] Les Grotesques de la Musique, pp. 295-6.

[40] Letter to the Abbé Girod. See Hippeau, Berlioz intime, p. 434.

[41] Letter to Bennet. He did not believe in patriotism. "Patriotism? Fetichism! Cretinism!" (Mémoires, II, 261).

[42] Letter to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 July, 1862.

[43] Mémoires, II, 391.

[44] Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 January, 1859; 30 August, 1864; 13 July, 1866; and to A. Morel, 21 August, 1864.

[45] " ... Qui viderit illas
De lacrymis factas sentiet esse meis,"
wrote Berlioz, as an inscription for his Tristes in 1854.

[46] "One instantly recognises a companion in misfortune; and I found I was a happier man than Berlioz" (Wagner to Liszt, 5 July, 1855).

[47] Mémoires, II, 396.

[48] Mémoires, II, 415.

[49] "Yes, it is to that escape from the world that Parsifal owes its birth and growth. What man can, during a whole lifetime, gaze into the depths of this world with a calm reason and a cheerful heart? When he sees murder and rapine organised and legalised by a system of lies, impostures, and hypocrisy, will he not avert his eyes and shudder with disgust?" (Wagner, Representations of the Sacred Drama of Parsifal at Bayreuth, in 1882.)

[50] The scene was described to me by his friend, Malwida von Meysenbug, the calm and fearless author of Mémoires d'une Idéaliste.

[51] "I have only blank walls before my windows. On the side of the street a pug dog has been barking for an hour, a parrot screaming, and a parroqueet imitating the chirp of sparrows. On the side of the yard the washerwomen are singing, and another parroqueet cries incessantly, 'Shoulder arrms!' How long the day is!"

"The maddening noise of carriages shakes the silence of the night. Paris wet and muddy! Parisian Paris! Now everything is quiet ... she is sleeping the sleep of the unjust" (Written to Ferrand, Lettres intimes, pp. 269 and 302).

[52] He used to say that nothing would remain of his work; that he had deceived himself; and that he would have liked to burn his scores.

[53] Blaze de Bury met him one autumn evening, on the quay, just before his death, as he was returning from the Institute. "His face was pale, his figure wasted and bent, and his expression dejected and nervous; one might have taken him for a walking shadow. Even his eyes, those large round hazel eyes, had extinguished their fire. For a second he clasped my hand in his own thin, lifeless one, and repeated, in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper, Aeschylus's words: 'Oh, this life of man! When he is happy a shadow is enough to disturb him; and when he is unhappy his trouble may be wiped away, as with a wet sponge, and all is forgotten'" (Musiciens d'hier et d'aujourd'hui).

[54] A travers chants, pp. 8-9.

[55] In truth, this genius was smouldering since his childhood; it was there from the beginning; and the proof of it lies in the fact that he used for his Ouverture des Francs-Juges and for the Symphonie fantastique airs and phrases of quintets which he had written when twelve years old (see Mémoires, I, 16-18).

[56] The Huit scènes de Faust are taken from Goethe's tragedy, translated by Gérard de Nerval, and they include: (1) Chants de la fête de Pâques; (2) Paysans sous les tilleuls; (3) Concert des Sylphes; (4 and 5) Taverne d'Auerbach, with the two songs of the Rat and the Flea; (6) Chanson du roi de Thulé; (7) Romance de Marguerite, "D'amour, l'ardente flamme," and Choeur de soldats; (8) Sérénade de Méphistophélès—that is to say, the most celebrated and characteristic pages of the Damnation (see M. Prudhomme's essays on Le Cycle de Berlioz).

[57] One could hardly find a better manifestation of the soul of a youthful musical genius than that in certain letters written at this time; in particular the letter written to Ferrand on 28 June, 1828, with its feverish postscript. What a life of rich and overflowing vigour! It is a joy to read it; one drinks at the source of life itself.

[58] Mémoires, I, 70.

[59] Ibid. To make amends for this he published, in 1829, a biographical notice of Beethoven, in which his appreciation of him is remarkably in advance of his age. He wrote there: "The Choral Symphony is the culminating point of Beethoven's genius," and he speaks of the Fourth Symphony in C sharp minor with great discernment.

[60] Beethoven died in 1827, the year when Berlioz was writing his first important work, the Ouverture des Francs-Juges.

[61] He left Henrietta Smithson in 1842; she died in 1854.

[62] Written by Berlioz himself, in irony, in a letter of 1855.

[63] Mémoires, I, 307.

[64] About this time he wrote to Liszt regarding L'Enfance du Christ: "I think I have hit upon something good in Herod's scena and air with the soothsayers; it is full of character, and will, I hope, please you. There are, perhaps, more graceful and pleasing things, but with the exception of the Bethlehem duet, I do not think they have the same quality of originality" (17 December, 1854).

[65] In 1830, old Rouget de Lisle called Berlioz, "a volcano in eruption" (Mémoires, I, 158).

[66] M. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote in his Portraits et Souvenirs, 1900: "Whoever reads Berlioz's scores before hearing them played can have no real idea of their effect. The instruments appear to be arranged in defiance of all common sense; and it would seem, to use professional slang, that cela ne dut pas sonner, but cela sonne wonderfully. If we find here and there obscurities of style, they do not appear in the orchestra; light streams into it and plays there as in the facets of a diamond."

[67] See the excellent essay of H. Lavoix, in his Histoire de l'Instrumentation. It should be noticed that Berlioz's observations in his Traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes (1844) have not been lost upon Richard Strauss, who has just published a German edition of the work, and some of whose most famous orchestral effects are realisations of Berlioz's ideas.

[68] One may judge of this instinct by one fact: he wrote the overtures of Les Francs-Juges and Waverley without really knowing if it were possible to play them. "I was so ignorant," he says, "of the mechanism of certain instruments, that after having written the solo in D flat for the trombone in the Introduction of Les Francs-Juges, I feared it would be terribly difficult to play. So I went, very anxious, to one of the trombonists of the Opera orchestra. He looked at the passage and reassured me. 'The key of D flat is,' he said, 'one of the pleasantest for that instrument; and you can count on a splendid effect for that passage'" (Mémoires, I, 63).

[69] Mémoires, I, 64.

[70] "Berlioz displayed, in calculating the properties of mechanism, a really astounding scientific knowledge. If the inventors of our modern industrial machinery are to be considered benefactors of humanity to-day, Berlioz deserves to be considered as the true saviour of the musical world; for, thanks to him, musicians can produce surprising effects in music by the varied use of simple mechanical means.... Berlioz lies hopelessly buried beneath the ruins of his own contrivances" (Oper und Drama, 1851).

[71] Letter from Berlioz to Ferrand.

[72] "The chief characteristics of my music are passionate expression, inward warmth, rhythmic in pulses, and unforeseen effects. When I speak of passionate expression, I mean an expression that desperately strives to reproduce the inward feeling of its subject, even when the theme is contrary to passion, and deals with gentle emotions or the deepest calm. It is this kind of expression that may be found in L'Enfance du Christ, and, above all, in the scene of Le Ciel in the Damnation de Faust and in the Sanctus of the Requiem" (Mémoires, II, 361).

[73] "So you are in the midst of melting glaciers in your Niebelungen! To be writing in the presence of Nature herself must be splendid. It is an enjoyment which I am denied. Beautiful landscapes, lofty peaks, or great stretches of sea, absorb me instead of evoking ideas in me. I feel, but I cannot express what I feel. I can only paint the moon when I see its reflection in the bottom of a well" (Berlioz to Wagner, 10 September, 1855).

[74] Musikführer, 29 November, 1903.

[75] Mémoires, II, 361.

[76] M. Jean Marnold has remarked this genius for monody in Berlioz in his article on Hector Berlioz, musicien (Mercure de France, 15 January, and 1 February, 1905).

[77] Gluck himself said this in a letter to the Mercure de France, February, 1773.

[78] I am not speaking of the Franco-Flemish masters at the end of the sixteenth century: of Jannequin, Costeley, Claude le Jeune, or Mauduit, recently discovered by M. Henry Expert, who are possessed of so original a flavour, and have yet remained almost entirely unknown from their own time to ours. Religious wars bruised France's musical traditions and denied some of the grandeur of her art.

[79] It is amusing to find Wagner comparing Berlioz with Auber, as the type of a true French musician—Auber and his mixed Italian and German opera. That shows how Wagner, like most Germans, was incapable of grasping the real originality of French music, and how he saw only its externals. The best way to find out the musical characteristics of a nation is to study its folk-songs. If only someone would devote himself to the study of French folk-song (and there is no lack of material), people would realise perhaps how much it differs from German folk-song, and how the temperament of the French race shows itself there as being sweeter and freer, more vigorous and more expressive.

[80] Mémoires, I, 221.

[81] "Music to-day, in the vigour of her youth, is emancipated and free and can do what she pleases. Many old rules have no longer any vogue; they were made by unreflecting minds, or by lovers of routine for other lovers of routine. New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the breaking of ancient laws. Many forms have become too hackneyed to be still adopted. The same thing may be entirely good or entirely bad, according to the use one makes of it, or the reasons one has for making use of it. Sound and sonority are secondary to thought, and thought is secondary to feeling and passion." (These opinions were given with reference to Wagner's concerts in Paris, in 1860, and are taken from A travers chants, p. 312.)

Compare Beethoven's words: "There is no rule that one may not break for the advancement of beauty."

[82] Is it necessary to recall the épître dédicatoire of Alceste in 1769, and Gluck's declaration that he "sought to bring music to its true function—that of helping poetry to strengthen the expression of the emotions and the interest of a situation ... and to make it what fine colouring and the happy arrangement of light and shade are to a skilful drawing"?

[83] This revolutionary theory was already Mozart's: "Music should reign supreme and make one forget everything else.... In an opera it is absolutely necessary that Poetry should be Music's obedient daughter" (Letter to his father, 13 October, 1781). Despairing probably at being unable to obtain this obedience, Mozart thought seriously of breaking up the form of opera, and of putting in its place, in 1778, a sort of melodrama (of which Rousseau had given an example in 1773), which he called "duodrama," where music and poetry were loosely associated, yet not dependent on each other, but went side by side on two parallel roads (Letter of 12 November, 1778).

[84] Tribune de Saint Gervais, November, 1903.

[85] Mémoires, II, 365.

[86] "This composition contains a dose of sublimity much too strong for the ordinary public; and Berlioz, with the splendid insolence of genius, advises the conductor, in a note, to turn the page and pass it over" (Georges de Massougnes, Berlioz). This fine study by Georges de Massougnes appeared in 1870, and is very much in advance of its time.

[87] "Oh, how I love, honour, and reverence Schumann for having written this article alone" (Hugo Wolf, 1884).

[88] Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. See Hector Berlioz und Robert Schumann. Berlioz was constantly righting for this freedom of rhythm—for "those harmonies of rhythm," as he said. He wished to form a Rhythm class at the Conservatoire (Mémoires, II, 241), but such a thing was not understood in France. Without being as backward as Italy on this point, France is still resisting the emancipation of rhythm (Mémoires, II, 196). But during the last ten years great progress in music has been made in France.

[89] Ibid. "A rare peculiarity," adds Schumann, "which distinguishes nearly all his melodies." Schumann understands why Berlioz often gives as an accompaniment to his melodies a simple bass, or chords of the augmented and diminished fifth—ignoring the intermediate parts.

[90] "What will then remain of actual art? Perhaps Berlioz will be its sole representative. Not having studied the pianoforte, he had an instinctive aversion to counterpoint. He is in this respect the opposite of Wagner, who was the embodiment of counterpoint, and drew the utmost he could from its laws" (Saint-Saëns).

[91] Jacques Passy notes that with Berlioz the most frequent phrases consist of twelve, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty bars. With Wagner, phrases of eight bars are rare, those of four more common, those of two still more so, while those of one bar are most frequent of all (Berlioz et Wagner, article published in Le Correspondant, 10 June, 1888).

[92] One must make mention here of the poorness and awkwardness of Berlioz's harmony—which is incontestable—since some critics and composers have been able to see (Am I saying something ridiculous?—Wagner would say it for me) nothing but "faults of orthography" in his genius. To these terrible grammarians—who, two hundred years ago, criticised Molière on account of his "jargon"—I shall reply by quoting Schumann.

But let us leave that "grammatical discussion" as well as what Wagner wrote on "the childish question as to whether it is permitted or not to introduce 'neologisms' in matters of harmony and melody" (Wagner to Berlioz, 22 February, 1860). As Schumann has said, "Look out for fifths, and then leave us in peace."

[93] Mémoires, I, 155.

[94] These words are taken from Berlioz's directions on the score of his arrangement of the Marseillaise for full orchestra and double choir.

[95] "From Beethoven," says Berlioz, "dates the advent in art of colossal forms" (Mémoires, II, 112). But Berlioz forgot one of Beethoven's models—Händel. One must also take into account the musicians of the French revolution: Mehul, Gossec, Cherubini, and Lesueur, whose works, though they may not equal their intentions, are not without grandeur, and often disclose the intuition of a new and noble and popular art.

[96] Letter to Morel, 1855. Berlioz thus describes the Tibiomnes and the Judex of his Te Deum. Compare Heine's judgment: "Berlioz's music makes me think of gigantic kinds of extinct animals, of fabulous empires.... Babylon, the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the wonders of Nineveh, the daring buildings of Mizraim."

[97] Mémoires, I, 17.

[98] Letter to an unknown person, written probably about 1855, in the collection of Siegfried Ochs, and published in the Geschichte der französischen Musik of Alfred Bruneau, 1904. That letter contains a rather curious analytical catalogue of Berlioz's works, drawn up by himself. He notes there his predilection for compositions of a "colossal nature," such as the Requiem, the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, and the Te Deum, or those of "an immense style," such as the Impériale.

[99] Mémoires, II, 364. See also the letter quoted above.

[100] Mémoires, II, 363. See also II, 163, and the description of the great festival of 1844, with its 1,022 performers.

[101] Hermann Kretzschmar, Führer durch den Konzertsaal.

[102] Mémoires, I, 312.

[103] Letter to some young Hungarians, 14 February, 1861. See the Mémoires, II, 212, for the incredible emotion which the Marche de Rakoczy roused in the audience at Budapest, and, above all, for the astonishing scene at the end:—

[104] Written 5 May, 1841.

[105] Berlioz never ceased to inveigh against the Revolution of 1848—which should have had his sympathies. Instead of finding material, like Wagner, in the excitement of that time for impassioned compositions, he worked at L'Enfance du Christ. He affected absolute indifference—he who was so little made for indifference. He approved the State's action, and despised its visionary hopes.

[106] "My musical career would finish very pleasingly if only I could live for a hundred and forty years" (Mémoires, II, 390).

[107] This solitude struck Wagner. "Berlioz's loneliness is not only one of external circumstances; its origin is in his temperament. Though he is a Frenchman, with quick sympathies and interests like those of his fellow-citizens, yet he is none the less alone. He sees no one before him who will hold out a helping hand, there is no one by his side on whom he may lean" (Article written 5 May, 1841). As one reads these words, one feels it was Wagner's lack of sympathy and not his intelligence that prevented him from understanding Berlioz. In his heart I do not doubt that he knew well who was his great rival. But he never said anything about it—unless perhaps one counts an odd document, certainly not intended for publication, where he (even he) compares him to Beethoven and to Bonaparte (Manuscript in the collection of Alfred Bovet, published by Mottl in German magazines, and by M. Georges de Massougnes in the Revue d'art dramatique, 1 January, 1902).

[108] F. Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner.

[109] The quotations from Wagner are taken from his letters to Roeckel, Uhlig, and Liszt, between 1851 and 1856.

[110]

These verses were read by M. Saint-Saëns at a concert given on 10 June, 1896, in the Salle Pleyel, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his début, which he made in 1846. It was in this same Salle Pleyel that he gave his first concert.

[111] C. Saint-Saëns, Harmonie et Mélodie, 1885.

[112] C. Saint-Saëns, Rimes familières, 1890.

[113] Letter written to M. Levin, the correspondent of the Boersen-Courier of Berlin, 9 September, 1901.

[114] C. Saint-Saëns, Charles Gounod et le Don Juan de Mozart, 1894.

[115]

[116] Charles Gounod, Mémoires d'un Artiste, 1896.

[117] Quoted from Saint-Saëns by Edmond Hippeau in Henry VIII et L'Opéra français, 1883. M. Saint-Saëns speaks elsewhere of "these works, well written, but heavy and unattractive, and reflecting in a tiresome way the narrow and pedantic spirit of certain little towns in Germany" (Harmonie et Mélodie).

[118] Charles Gounod, "Ascanio" de Saint-Saëns, 1890.

[119] Id., ibid.

[120] C. Saint-Saëns, Problèmes et Mystères, 1894.