VI
In Hector Berlioz (b. 1803 at Côte St. André, Isère) we have one of those few men who is not to be explained by any amount of examination of sources. Only to a small extent was he specifically determined by his environment. He is unique in his time and in musical history. He, again, is to be explained only as a gift of Heaven (or of the devil, as his contemporaries thought). In a general way, however, he is very brilliantly to be explained by the Paris of 1830. The external tumult, the breaking of rules, the assertion of individuality, all worked upon his sensitive spirit and dominated his creative genius. He was at bottom a childlike, affectionate man, ‘demanding at every moment in his life to love and be loved,’ as Romain Rolland says. In Renaissance Florence, we may imagine, he might have been a Fra Angelico, or at least no more bumptious than a Filippo Lippi. It was because he was so delicately sensitive that he became, in the Paris of 1830, a violent revolutionist.
His father was a provincial physician and, like so many other fathers in artistic history, seemed to the end of his days ashamed of the fact that he had a genius for a son. The boy imbibed his first music among the amateurs of his town. He went to Paris to study medicine—because his father would provide him funds for nothing else. He loyally studied his science for a while, but nothing could keep him out of music. Without his father’s consent or even knowledge he entered the Conservatory, where he remained at swords’ points with the director, Cherubini, who cuts a ridiculous figure in his ‘Memoirs.’ By hook and crook, and by the generosity of creditors, he managed to live on and get his musical education. His father became partially reconciled when he realized there was nothing else to do. But how Berlioz took to heart the lawlessness of the romantic school! Nothing that was, was right. All that is most typically Gallic—clearness, economy, control—is absent in his youthful work. ‘Ah, me!’ says he in his ‘Memoirs,’ ‘what was the good God thinking of when He dropped me down in this pleasant land of France?’
The events of his career are not very significant. He had a wild time of shocking people. He organized concerts of his own works, chiefly by borrowing money. After two failures he won the Prix de Rome, and hardly reached Italy when he started to leave it on a picaresque errand of sentimental revenge. He fell in love with an English actress, Henriette Smithson, married her when she was passée and in debt, and eventually treated her rather shamefully. He gave concerts of his works in France, Germany, England, Russia. He was made curator of the Conservatory library. He was made an officer of the Legion of Honor. He wrote musical articles for the papers. He took life very much to heart. And, from time to time, he wrote musical works, very few of them anything less than masterpieces. That is all. The details of his life make entertaining reading. Very little is significant beyond an understanding of his personal character. He was called the genius without talent. Romain Rolland comes closer when he says, ‘Berlioz is the most extreme combination of power of genius with weakness of character.’ His power of discovering orchestral timbres is only equalled by his power of making enemies. There is no villainy recorded of his life; there are any number of mean things, and any number of wild, irrational things. His artistic sincerity is unquestioned, but it is mingled with any amount of the bad boy’s delight in shocking others. Like Schumann, but in his own manner, he made himself a crusader against the Philistines.
Of the unhappiness of his life it is quite sufficient to say that it was his own fault. His creed was the subjective, sentimental creed of the romanticists: ‘Sensible people,’ he exclaims, ‘cannot understand this intensity of being, this actual joy in existing, in dragging from life the uttermost it has to give in height and depth.’ He was haunted, too, by the romanticists’ passion for bigness. His ideal orchestra, he tells us in his work on Instrumentation, consists of 467 instruments—160 violins, 30 harps, eight pairs of kettle drums, 12 bassoons, 16 horns, and other instruments in similar abundance.
His great importance in the history of music is, of course, his development of the orchestra. No one else has ever observed orchestral possibilities so keenly and used them so surely. His musical ideas, as played on the piano, may sound banal, but when they are heard in the orchestra they become pure magic. He never was a pianist; his virtuosity as a performer was lavished on the flute and guitar. For this reason, perhaps, his orchestral writing is the least pianistic, the most inherently contrapuntal of any of the period.
He was a pioneer in freeing instrumental music from the dominance of traditional forms. Forms may be always necessary, but their raison d’être, as Berlioz insisted, should be expressive and not traditional. Berlioz was the first great exponent of program music; Liszt owes an immense amount to him. He was also the first to use in a thorough-going way the leit-motif, or the idée fixe, as he called it. Not that he
developed the theory of the dramatic use of the leit-motif as Wagner did, but he made extensive use of the melody expressive of a particular idea or personage. His output was limited, both in range and in quantity, but there are few composers who have had a higher average of excellence throughout their work—always on the understanding that you like his subject-matter. The hearer who does not may intellectually admit his technical mastery of the orchestra, but he will feel that the composer is sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.