IV
Yet this ‘controlled romanticism,’ which Mendelssohn doubtless hoped would found a school, had little historical result. The frenzied spirits of the time needed some more vigorous stimulation, and those who had vitality sufficient to make history were not the ones to be guided by an academic gourmet. The Mendelssohn concert overtures are a pleasant by-path in music; they by no means strike a note to ring down the corridors of time. ‘Controlled romanticism’ was not the message for Mendelssohn’s age; for this age was essentially militant, smashing idols and blazing new paths, and nothing could feed its appetite save bitter fruit.
This bitter fruit it had in full measure in Berlioz’s romantic symphonies, as in Liszt’s symphonic poems. Of the true romantic symphonies the most remarkable is Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, one of the most astonishing productions in the whole history of music. It seems safe to say that in historical fruitfulness this work ranks with three or four others of the greatest—Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo, in 1607; Wagner’s Tristan, and what else? The Fantastique created program music; it made an art form of the dramatic symphony (including the not yet invented symphonic poem and all forms of free and story-telling symphonic works). At the same time it gave artistic existence to the leit-motif, or representative theme, the most fruitful single musical invention of the nineteenth century.
The Fantastique seems to have no ancestry; there is nothing in previous musical literature to which more than the vaguest parallel can be drawn, and there is nothing in Berlioz’s previous works to indicate that he had the power to take a new idea—two new ideas—out of the sky and work them out with such mature mastery. One might have expected a period of experimentation. One might at least expect the work to be the logical outcome of experiments by other men. But Berlioz had no true ancestor in this form; he had no more than chance forerunners.
Nevertheless program music, or at least descriptive music, in some form or other, is nearly as old as music itself. We have part-songs dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which imitate the cuckoo’s call, or the songs of other birds. Jannequin, contemporary with Palestrina, wrote a piece descriptive of the battle of Marignan, fought between the French and the Swiss in 1515. Even Bach joins the other program composers with his ‘Caprice on the departure of his brother,’ in which the posthorn is imitated. Couperin gave picturesque titles to nearly all his compositions, and Rameau wrote a delightful piece for harpsichord, suggestively called ‘The Hen.’ Many of Haydn’s symphonies have titles which add materially to the poetry of the music. Beethoven admitted that he never composed without some definite image in mind. His ‘Pastoral Symphony’ is so well known that it need only be mentioned, though strict theorists may deny it a place with program music on the plea that, in the composer’s own words, it is ‘rather the recording of impressions than painting.’ Yet Beethoven wrote one piece of downright program music in the strict sense, for his ‘Battle of Vittoria’ frankly sets out to describe one of the battles of the Napoleonic wars. It is, however, pure hack work, one of the few works of the master which might have been composed by a mediocre man. It is of a sort of debased program music which was much in fashion at the time, easy and silly stuff which pretended to describe anything from a landscape up to the battle of Waterloo. The instances of imitative music in Haydn’s ‘Creation’ are well known. Coming down to later times we find the ophicleide imitating the braying of the ass in Mendelssohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ overture, and since then few composers, however reserved in manner and classic in taste, have wholly disdained it.
Yet all this long, even distinguished, history does not fully prepare the way for the program music of Berlioz. It is not likely that he was familiar with much of it. And even if he had been he could have found no programmistic form or idea ready at hand for his program pieces. The program music idea was rather ‘in the air’ than in specific musical works. From the literary romanticists’ theory of the mixing of the genres and the mingling of the arts his lively mind no doubt drew a hint. And the influence of his teacher, Lesueur, at the Conservatory must be reckoned on. Lesueur was something of a radical and apostle of program music in his day, having been, in fact, relieved of his duties as director of music in Notre Dame because he insisted upon attuning men’s minds to piety by means of ‘picturesque and descriptive’ performances of the Mass. Program music! Here was a true forerunner of Berlioz—a very bad boy in a very solemn church. Perhaps this accounts for Berlioz’s veneration of his teacher, one of the few men who doesn’t figure somewhat disgracefully in the Memoirs. At any rate, the young revolutionist found in Lesueur a sympathetic spirit such as is rarely to be found in conservatories.
To sum up, then, we find that Berlioz had no precedent in reputable music for a sustained work of a close descriptive nature. Works of picturesque quality, which specifically do not ‘depict events’—like the ‘Pastoral’ symphony—are not program music in the more exact sense. Isolated bits of description in good music, like the famous ‘leaping stag’ and ‘shaggy lion’ of Haydn’s ‘Creation,’ offer no analogy for sustained description. And the supposed pieces of sustained description, like the fashionable ‘battle’ pieces, had and deserved no musical standing. The Fantastique, as we shall see, was detailed and sustained description of the first rank musically. The gap between the Fantastique and its supposed ancestors was quite complete. It was bridged by pure genius.
As for the leit-motif, it is even more Berlioz’s own invention. The use of a particular theme to represent a particular personage or emotion was, of course, in such program music as had existed. But only in a few isolated instances had this been used recurrently to accompany a dramatic story. Mozart, in Don Giovanni, had used the famous trombone theme to represent the Statue, first in the Graveyard scene and later in the Supper scene. Weber had somewhat loosely used a particular theme to represent the devil Samiel in Der Freischütz. We know from Berlioz’s own description[98] how this work affected him in his early Parisian years and we may assume that the notion of the leit-motif took hold on him then. But the leit-motif in Mozart and Weber is hardly used as a deliberate device, rather only as a natural repetition under similar dramatic conditions. The use of the leit-motif in symphonic music, and its variation under varied conditions belongs solely to Berlioz.
True to romantic traditions, Berlioz evolved the Fantastique out of his own joys and sorrows. It originated in the frenzy of his love for the actress, Henriette Smithson. He writes in February, 1830:[99]
‘Again, without warning and without reason, my ill-starred passion wakes. She is in London, yet I feel her presence ever with me. I listen to the beating of my heart, it is like a sledge-hammer, every nerve in my body quivers with pain.
‘Woe upon her! Could she but dream of the poetry, the infinite bliss of such love as mine, she would fly to my arms, even though my embrace should be her death.
‘I was just going to begin my great symphony (Episode in an Artist’s Life) to depict the course of this infernal love of mine—but I can write nothing.’
Why, this is very midsummer madness! you say. But the kind of madness from which came much good romantic music. For the work had been planned in the previous year, not long after Miss Smithson had rejected Berlioz’s first advances.
But the composer very soon found that he could write—and he wrote like a fiend. In May he tells a friend that the rehearsals of the symphony will begin in three days. The concert is to take place on the 30th. As for Miss Smithson, ‘I pity and despise her. She is nothing but a commonplace woman with an instinct for expressing the tortures of the soul that she has never felt.’ Yet he wished that ‘the theatre people would somehow plot to get her there—that wretched woman! She could not but recognize herself.’
The performance of the symphony finally came off toward the end of the year. But in the meantime a new goddess had descended from the skies. The composer’s marriage was to depend on the success of the concert—so he says. ‘It must be a theatrical success; Camille’s parents insist upon that as a condition of our marriage. I hope I shall succeed.
‘P. S. That wretched Smithson girl is still here. I have not seen her.’
And a few weeks later: ‘I had a frantic success. They actually encored the Marche au Supplice. I am mad! mad! My marriage is fixed for Easter, 1832. My blessed symphony has done the deed.’
But not quite. He was rewriting this same symphony a few months later in Italy when there came a letter from Camille’s mother announcing her engagement to M. Pleyel!
As explanation to the symphony the composer wrote an extended ‘program’—in the strictest modern sense. He notes, however, that the program may be dispensed with, as ‘the symphony (the author hopes) offers sufficient musical interest in itself, independent of any dramatic intention.’ The program of the Fantastique is worth quoting entire, since it stands as the prototype and model of all musical programs since:
‘A young musician of morbid sensitiveness and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in an excess of amorous despair. The narcotic dose, too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep, accompanied by the strangest visions, while his sensations, sentiments and memories translate themselves in his sick brain into musical thoughts and images. The loved one herself has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea which he rediscovers and hears everywhere.
‘First Part: Reveries, Passions. He first recalls that uneasiness of the soul, that wave of passions, those melancholies, those reasonless joys, which he experienced before having seen her whom he loves; then the volcanic love with which she suddenly inspired him, his frenzied heart-rendings, his jealous fury, his reawakening tenderness, his religious consolations.
‘Second Part: A Ball. He finds the loved one at a ball, in the midst of tumult and a brilliant fête.
‘Third Part: In the Country. A summer evening in the country: he hears two shepherds conversing with their horns; this pastoral duet, the natural scene, the soft whispering of the winds in the trees, a few sentiments of hope which he has recently conceived, all combine to give his soul an unwonted calm, to give a happier color to his thoughts; but she appears anew, his heart stops beating, painful misapprehensions stir him—if she should deceive him! One of the shepherds repeats his naïve melody; the other does not respond. The sun sets—distant rolls of thunder—solitude—silence——
‘Fourth Part: March to the Gallows. He dreams that he has killed his loved one, that he is condemned to death, led to the gallows. The cortège advances, to the sounds of a march now sombre and wild, now brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy steps follows immediately upon the noisiest shouts. Finally, the fixed idea reappears for an instant like a last thought of love, to be interrupted by the fatal blow.
‘Fifth Part: Dream of the Witches’ Festival. He fancies he is present at a witches’ dance, in the midst of a gruesome company of shades, sorcerers, and monsters of all sorts gathered for his funeral. Strange sounds, sighs, bursts of laughter, distant cries and answers. The loved melody reappears again; but it has lost its character of nobility and timidity; it is nothing but an ignoble dance, trivial and grotesque; it is she who comes to the witches’ festival. Sounds of joy at her arrival. She mingles with the hellish orgy; uncanny noises—burlesque of the Dies Irae; dance of the witches. The witches’ dance and the Dies Irae follow.’
The music follows this program in detail, and supplies a host of other details to the sympathetic imagination. The opening movement contains a melody which Berlioz avers he composed at the age of twelve, when he was in love with yet another young lady, a certain Estelle, six years his senior. And in each movement occurs the ‘fixed idea,’ founder of that distinguished dynasty of leit-motifs in the nineteenth century:
In the opening movement, when the first agonies of love are at their height, this theme undergoes a long contrapuntal development which is a marvel of complexity and harmonic energy. It recurs practically unchanged in the next three movements, and at its appearance in the fourth is cut short as the guillotine chops the musician’s head off. In the last movement it undergoes the change which makes this work the predecessor of Liszt’s symphonic poems:
The structure of this work is complicated in the extreme, and it abounds in harmonic and contrapuntal novelties which are strokes of pure genius. Many a musician may dislike the symphony, but none can help respecting it. The orchestra, though not large for our day, was revolutionary in its time. It included, in one movement or another (besides the usual strings) a small flute and two large ones; oboes; two clarinets, a small clarinet, and an English horn; four horns, two trumpets, two cornets à pistons, and three trombones; four bassoons, two ophicleides, four pairs of kettle-drums, cymbals, bells, and bass drum.
A challenge to the timid spirits of the time; and a thing of revolutionary significance to modern music.
The other great dramatic symphonies of the time belong wholly to Berlioz and Liszt. The Revolutionary Symphony which Berlioz had planned under the stimulus of the 1830 revolution, became, about 1837, the Symphonie Funèbre et Héroïque, composed in honor of the men killed in this insurrection. It is mostly of inferior stuff compared with the composer’s other works, but the ‘Funeral Sermon’ of the second movement, which is a long accompanied recitative for the trombones, is extremely impressive. ‘Harold in Italy,’ founded upon Byron’s ‘Childe Harold,’ was planned during Berlioz’s residence in Italy, and executed under the stimulus of Paganini. Here again we have the ‘fixed idea,’ in the shape of a lovely solo, representing the morose hero, given to the viola. The work was first planned as a viola concerto, but the composer’s poetic instinct carried him into a dramatic symphony. First Harold is in the mountains and Byronic moods of longing creep over him. Then a band of pilgrims approaches and his melody mingles with their chant. Then the hero hears an Abruzzi mountaineer serenading his lady love, and to the tune of his ‘fixed idea’ he invites his own soul to muse of love. And, finally, Harold is captured by brigands, and his melody mingles with their wild dance.
Berlioz’s melodies are apt to be dry and even cerebral in their character, but this one for Harold is as beautiful as one could wish:
The ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is by many considered Berlioz’s finest work. It is in two parts, the first including a number of choruses and recitatives narrating the course of the tragedy, and the second developing various pictures selected out of the action. The love scene is ‘pure’ music of the highest beauty, and the scherzo, based on the ‘Queen Mab’ speech, is one of Berlioz’s most typical inventions.
All these compositions antedate by a number of years the works of Liszt and Wagner, which make extended use of Berlioz’s means. Wagner describes at length how the idea of leit-motifs occurred to him during his composition of ‘The Flying Dutchman’ (completed in 1841), but he was certainly familiar with Berlioz’s works. Liszt was from the first a great admirer of Berlioz, and greatly helped to extend his reputation through his masterly piano arrangements of the Frenchman’s works. His development of the leit-motif in his symphonic poems is frankly an adaptation of the Berlioz idea.
Liszt’s dramatic symphonies are two—‘Dante’ and ‘Faust’—by which, doubtless, if he had his way, his name would chiefly be known among the nations. We have seen in an earlier chapter how deeply Liszt was impressed by the great paintings in Rome, and how in his youth he dreamed of some later Beethoven who would translate Dante into an immortal musical work. In the quiet of Weimar he set himself to accomplish the labor. The work is sub-titled ‘Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise,’ but it is in two movements, the Purgatory leading into, or perhaps only to, the gate of Heaven. The first movement opens with one of the finest of all Liszt’s themes, designed to express Dante’s
lines: ‘Through me the entrance to the city of horror; through me the entrance into eternal pain; through me the entrance to the dwelling place of the damned.’ And immediately another motive for the horns and trumpets to the famous words: ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’ The movement, with an excessive use of the diminished seventh chord, depicts the sufferings of the damned. But presently the composer comes to a different sort of anguish, which challenges all his powers as tone poet. It is the famous episode of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. It is introduced by another motive of great beauty, standing for the words: ‘There is no greater anguish than, during suffering, to think of happier times.’ In the Francesca episode Liszt lavishes all his best powers, and achieves some of his finest pages. The music now descends into the lower depths of the Inferno, and culminates in a thunderous restatement of the theme, ‘All hope abandon,’ by the horns, trumpets and trombones. The second movement, representing Purgatory, strikes a very different note, one of hope and aspiration, and culminates in the Latin Magnificat, sung by women’s voices to a modal tune, which Liszt, now once more a loyal Catholic, writes from the heart.
The ‘Faust’ symphony, written between 1854 and 1857, is hardly less magnificent in its plan and execution. It is sub-titled ‘three character-pictures,’ and its movements are assigned respectively to Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. Yet the last movement merges into a dramatic narration of the love story and of Faust’s philosophic aspirations, and reaches its climax in a men’s chorus intoning the famous final chorus from Goethe’s drama: ‘All things transitory are but a semblance.’ The Faust theme deserves quoting because of its chromatic character, which has become so typical of modern music:
The whole work is in Liszt’s most exalted vein. The ‘character pictures’ are suggestive in the extreme, and are contrasted in the most vivid manner. Liszt has rarely surpassed in sheer beauty the Gretchen episode, the theme of which later becomes the setting for Goethe’s famous line, ‘The eternal feminine leads us upward and on.’ These two works—the ‘Dante’ and the ‘Faust’—are doubtless not so supremely creative as Liszt imagined, but they remain among the noblest things in modern music. Their great difficulty of execution, even to orchestras in our day, stands in the way of their more frequent performance, but to those who hear them they prove unforgettable. In them, more than in any other of his works, Liszt has lavished his musical learning and invention, has put all that was best and noblest in himself.