The Centenary Celebrations.
December 10, 1903.
Berlioz was the Columbus of music; he discovered the New World. By his theory and practice of orchestration he so greatly enlarged and enriched the resources of tone that all contemporary and subsequent composers capable of understanding his message experienced an immense exhilaration—a sense that new and hitherto undreamed-of possibilities were opening out before them. The starting-point of his momentous voyages was the idea of what is called "programme music." Like Wagner, he perceived that after Beethoven symphonic music could do no more on the old lines, but that music might learn to characterise much more sharply than it had ever done before. His prodigious reform, enlargement, and enrichment of orchestration was entirely carried out under the influence of the desire for stronger and finer characterisation, for a more varied and interesting play of emotion and graphic suggestion. A good many musicians and music-lovers at the present day, recognising the enormous merit of Berlioz's achievement in orchestration, yet consider that, like Moses, he was not allowed to enter the promised land to which he had led his people; or, more literally, that Berlioz was not able to make really good use of his own discoveries, the importance of which is to be recognised in the music of Wagner, Dvoràk, Tchaïkovsky, and others who learned from Berlioz, rather than in his own music. While admitting that later men, such as those mentioned, have used the Berlioz instrument to a more spiritual kind of purpose or with greater epic and dramatic significance, the open-minded music-lover can scarcely deny that the compositions of Berlioz, considered as absolute works of art, include a majestic array of masterpieces. Such things as the "Te Deum" and "Messe des Morts" bear, in their unparalleled vastness of conception, the stamp of an imagination comparable only to Michel Angelo's. They are mighty fragments of larger works never carried out—impossible to be carried out. The best-known work by Berlioz—and the most perfect, on the whole, of the extended works—is the "Faust," which must not be judged as an operatic version of Goethe's "Faust," but rather as a musical setting of the "Faust" story in the racy and drastic manner of the mediæval puppet plays, Goethe's drama being only used in so far as it affords suggestions for scenes of the well-salted and drastic animation that Berlioz loved. Berlioz was a typical French Romantic. His music is absolutely wanting in the ethical element that is so strong in Bach and Beethoven. But he had a powerful and truly poetic sense of the wonderful, the beautiful, the weird, and the characteristic. Over and over again in his "Faust" he achieves typical excellence. That rapture of spring which is one of the great, imperishable poetic themes has nowhere in music been better rendered than in the first pages of "Faust" (orchestra and tenor voice), and the ensuing peasant choruses are by far the best musical expression of that "sunburnt mirth" which outside the world of art is only possible under a southern sky. The Rácoczy March as orchestrated by Berlioz is not only the finest piece of military music in the world but is an immeasureably long way ahead of the next best piece. The energy, gaiety, and tumultuous eloquence of the final section (altogether Berlioz's own, of course), give us the musical symbol of "La Gloire"—that important conception which has played a part in history for three centuries. The scene on the banks of the Elbe is woven of moonbeams and gossamer fancies that no other composer could have handled. The rhythm of the Mephisto serenade is too good for this world. Here the composer succeeds in expressing the diabolical without any direct suggestion of malice—simply by creating the rhythm and accent of laughter too monstrously whole-hearted and full-blooded for a mere man. Another miracle is the "Chanson Gothique" (about the King of Thule), which is, as it were, the distilled essence of all mediæval romances about lovesick maidens looking forth from their casements. In the latter part the composer falls a victim to his evil genius—the macabre,—and the terrible squint of the madman is perceptible in the "Ride to the Abyss" and the howling and gibbering of demons, which entirely lack the significance of the demons in "Gerontius," and simply show us the composer indulging his taste for the grotesque horrors of the old miracle plays. The latter part of the composition should not be taken too seriously. Even in the early part there is one example of the composer's peculiar fondness for guying the offices of religion. But this, too, should be lightly passed over and forgiven in consideration of the feast that the work as a whole offers to the imagination and the bracing salt wind of the composer's manly and affirmative genius.