II
Let us first of all look at him biographically and historically, as he was in himself and in his relations to his contemporaries. His is perhaps the strangest story in all the records of music. In contrast to musicians like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, and a score of others, who grew up from childhood in an atmosphere saturated with music, Berlioz is born in a country town that is practically destitute of musical life. Even the piano is not cultivated there, the harp and guitar being almost the sole instruments known; in 1808—five years after the birth of Berlioz—there is still only one piano in the Department. There is no teacher of music in the place; Berlioz's father ultimately combines with other residents to bring over for this purpose a second violinist from the theatre at Lyons. Although the music in the boy cannot quite be kept down, for nearly the first twenty years of his life he is, to all intents and purposes, ignorant of the elements of technique, and never hears a bar of first-rate music. "When I arrived in Paris in 1820," [2] he says, "I had never yet set foot in a theatre; all I knew of instrumental music was the quartets of Pleyel with which the four amateurs composing the Philharmonic Society of my native town used to regale me each Sunday after mass; and I had no other idea of dramatic music than what I had been able to get in running through a collection of old operatic airs arranged with an accompaniment for the guitar." Yet, untutored as he was, and practically ignorant of even the elements of harmony, he had from his boyhood been writing music. The opening melody of the Symphonie fantastique was really written by Berlioz in his twelfth year, to some verses from Florian's Estelle; [3] and we know of other boyish compositions, fragments of which have been conserved in some of his later works. It may not be absolutely true, as M. Edmond Hippeau says, that until the age of twenty-three he was "ignorant of the most elementary principles of music"; but at all events he was just beginning to learn these principles at an age when nine other composers out of ten have left far behind them all the drudgery of the apprentice. In Paris he does indeed study after a fashion; but it is characteristic of him that he gets most of his musical experience from the performances at the Opera, and from a diligent reading of the scores of Gluck in the library of the Conservatoire.
Even in Paris, at that time, there was little to call out the best there was in such a man as Berlioz—little that could teach him the proper use of his own strange faculties, or by whose standard he could test the worth of his own inspiration. He did indeed hear a little Gluck occasionally, and a travesty of Weber; but it was not until 1828 that Beethoven made any impression on Paris. Orchestras were generally incompetent and audiences ignorant. The calibre of the average French orchestra of the time may be gauged from the fact that even the more reputable bands found Mozart's symphonies by no means easy. One shudders to think what the ordinary orchestras must have been like, and what was the quality of music to which they had grown accustomed. As for the audiences, where they were not extremely uneducated they were extremely prejudiced, clinging blindly to the remains of the pseudo-classical principles that had been bequeathed to them by their fathers. An audience that could be worked into a perfect frenzy of rage because an actor, outraging all the proprieties of the time, actually referred in Othello to something so vulgar as a handkerchief, would hardly look with favour on anything revolutionary either in idea or technique. At the opera the Italians were most in vogue. The French public knew little of instrumental music pure and simple, and were almost entirely ignorant of the huge developments of German music. Cherubini, of course, was a stately and impressive figure, a serious thinker of the same breed as the great Germans; but apart from him, there were no Parisian composers who could by any stretch of the imagination be called modern, or could do anything to teach a man like Berlioz. Lesueur, the favourite master of Berlioz, seems to have been progressive—indeed, revolutionary—in some of his theories of music and poetry; but his theory was better than his practice. From such a type as the amiable and ineffectual Boïeldieu nothing new could possibly come. He frankly avowed his inability to understand Beethoven, and declared to Berlioz his preference for "la musique qui me berce." Yet this young musician from the country, with years of lost time to regret, with little musical education, with the very slightest of stimuli from the great music of the past, and with little encouragement in his own surroundings, produces in quick succession a number of works of the most startling originality—original in every way, in the turn of their melodies, in their harmonic facture, in their orchestration, in their rhythm, in their view of men and things. Now that the complete Berlioz is being printed, we know a good deal more of him than was possible even a few years ago. We do not now commence our study of him with the Symphonie fantastique; we can watch the workings of his brain in the two early cantatas—Herminie and Cléopâtre—that in the eyes of two sapient juries of the time were insufficient to win him the Prix de Rome. Here we see a freshness of outlook and of style—particularly in the matter of rhythm—that is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of music. In his earliest years, as in his latest, Berlioz was himself, a solitary figure owing practically nothing to other people's music, an artist, we may almost say, without ancestry and without posterity. Mozart builds upon Haydn and influences Beethoven; Beethoven imitates Mozart and in turn influences the practice of all later symphonists; Wagner learns from Weber and gives birth to a host of imitators. But with Berlioz—and it is a point to be insisted on—there is no one whose speech he tried to copy in his early years, and there is no one since who speaks with his voice. How many things in the early Beethoven were made in the factory of Mozart; how many times does the early Wagner speak with the voice of Weber! But who can turn over the scores of Berlioz's early works and find a single phrase that can be fathered upon any previous or contemporary writer? There was never any one, before his time or since, who thought and wrote just like him; his musical style especially is absolutely his own. Now and then in L'Enfance du Christ he suggests Gluck—not in the turn of his phrases but in the general atmosphere of an aria; but apart from this it is the rarest thing for him to remind us of any other composer. His melody, his harmony, his rhythm, are absolutely his own.