On the other hand, whenever, treating of general topics, as he does in the "Soirées d'Orchestre," the "A Travers Chants," and the "Grotesques de la Musique," he can avoid the pitfall of the confidential, he is one of the most charming of writers. Here his instinct for the salient leads him to put everything in the most vivid, captivating way, but without perversion; one no longer has the uncomfortable sense of being hoaxed, and can give oneself up to the enjoyment of his rich play of metaphor and allusion, his subtle irony, his unfailing good-nature, and his nervous, incisive style. Here, in short, his extraordinary intellectual vivacity is revealed at its best, undegraded by being made to serve those posings which, if not precisely dishonest, are still not quite ingenuous. His description, for example, of the machinations of the claqueurs or hired applauders at the opera house, known in Parisian slang as "Romans," in the seventh and eighth evenings of the "Soirées d'Orchestre,"[30] deserves a niche of its own in the literature of satire. After writing at some length "de viris illustribus urbis Romae," he goes on to enumerate the amateurs who swell the ranks of the claque, as follows:—
"They are: simple friends, who admire in good faith all that is to be done on the stage before the lamps are lighted; relations, those claqueurs given by nature; editors, ferocious claqueurs; and especially lovers and husbands. That is why women, besides the host of other advantages they have over men, have still one more chance of success than they. For a woman can hardly applaud her husband or lover to any purpose in a theatre or concert room; besides, she always has something else to do; while the husband or lover, provided he has the least natural capacity or some elementary notions of the art, can often bring about a success of renewal at the theatre.... Husbands are better than lovers for this sort of operation. The latter usually stand in fear of ridicule; they also fear in petto that a too brilliant success may make too many rivals; they no longer have any pecuniary interest in the triumphs of their mistresses. But the husband, who holds the purse-strings, who knows what can be done by a well-thrown bouquet, a well taken-up salvo, a well-communicated emotion, a well-carried recall, he alone dares to turn to account what faculties he has. He has the gift of ventriloquism and of ubiquity. He applauds for an instant from the amphitheatre, crying out: Brava! in a tenor voice, in chest tones; thence he flies to the lobby of the first boxes, and sticking his head through the opening cut in the door, he throws out an Admirable! in a voice of basso profundo while passing by, and then bounds breathless up to the third tier, from whence he makes the house resound with exclamations: 'Delicious! ravishing! Heavens! what talent! it is too much!' in a soprano voice, in shrill feminine tones stifled with emotion. There is a model husband for you, and a hard-working and intelligent father of a family."
The impression of paradox so markedly given by Berlioz's prose writings, in which such insight, wit, and good humor as we have here coexist with the tendency to pose revealed in his accounts of his love affairs, is intensified by his musical compositions. In them also he seems actuated by a desire, not to communicate his real feelings in their simplicity, but to project them into a dramatic conception, and to present that with all the pomp and circumstance of which he is capable. Not truth to inner experience, but vividness of external effect, is his ideal. Yet to the service of this ideal he brings admirable intellectual qualities: ingenuity, resourcefulness, imagination, an originality that scorns all platitude, and, at least in the matter of instrumentation, a matchless technical skill. The brilliant performance of rather specious undertakings—that is Berlioz's artistic cue.
This combination of trivial ends with highly clever means may be illustrated by the "Symphonie Fantastique," a work which, though written early in his career, remains one of his most characteristic productions. How different, to begin with, are the inspirations which a romanticist and a realist derive from the passion of love! Schumann, married to Clara Wieck after years of waiting, utters his joy in a series of songs, the most lyrical, the most intimate, that song literature has to show. Chopin, in an amorous revery, writes in the larghetto of the F-minor Concerto one of the quietest, simplest, most devout of all his pieces. Berlioz, on the contrary, is goaded by the thought of his Ophelia to conceive "a young musician of unhealthily sensitive nature," who "has poisoned himself with opium in a paroxysm of love-sick despair," and to carry this hero through a very detailed drama in five acts.[31] His impulse is, in short, realistic rather than lyrical, and the art in which he embodies it is descriptive and narrative rather than emotionally expressive.
The most important technical result of this realistic attitude is that Berlioz, as we have already noted, treats his melodies, not as materials for a purely musical development, but as symbols of characters or other dramatic motives, thereby anticipating the leit-motif idea which later became so prominent in the work of Wagner and Liszt. The central motive in the "Symphonie Fantastique" is the melody known as "l'idée fixe," symbolizing the beloved, roughly transcribed for the piano in Figure XXIV.
