Figure XXIV.
This melody, though it appears in each of the five movements, undergoes but little evolution; it is complete in the first place, and in its later phases is often modified hardly at all, or if so chiefly for dramatic reasons. In the Ball Scene two phrases of it are sounded pianissimo, by the clarinet, just after a sounding climax of the full orchestra,[32] to indicate the hero's remembrance of the beloved in the midst of the festivities. In the third movement, "In the Country," it is given to the oboe and flute (full score, p. 66), and is treated somewhat more ingeniously, its fifth phrase being interrupted by a rough tumult in all the strings. In "The Procession to the Stake" it figures purely as a theatrical property in a highly characteristic and amusing passage. The hero has finished his long march to the place of execution; as he puts his head on the block silence descends upon the scene, and then a single clarinet plays four measures of the theme—"Ah! he thinks of her once more"—but the thought is cut short by a blow of the axe (fortissimo chord, tutti) and the death-rattle (tremolando on three kettle-drums) ends the movement and his life together. Only in the last movement, the frenetic "Witches' Sabbath," is the theme really varied. Here, at p. 102, it appears as in Figure XXV, turned by change of rhythm and the addition of ornament into a grotesque, undignified dance tune.
Figure XXV.
This is certainly clever, but the incentive, we must remember, is still dramatic rather than musical—it is intended to show the loved one degraded to the horrid form of a witch.
There are many other subordinate features of the technique in which may be discerned the same preoccupation with spectacular effect rather than with musical beauty. The mere noise resorted to by the composer in tuning his drums in the third movement, in order to imitate thunder, has already been mentioned;[33] there is a deal of even more chaotic pandemonium in the last two movements. When the harmonies are in themselves consonant, they are sometimes combined so incongruously as to obliterate all sense of tonality and to generate merely a feeling of haste and confusion, as at page 94 in the score, where the chords of D-flat-major and G-minor tread on one another's heels; so unprecedented was this association of remote harmonies that Berlioz thought it necessary to point out in a foot-note that it was no clerical error, and to beg the violins and violas not to "correct" their parts. Even the scholastic and highly formal device of the fugato he treats with the sang froid of the habitual impressionist in that weird section of the "Witches' Sabbath" in which he makes a sort of devil's fugue, lost in limbo, on the rhythm of the witches' round dance (score, p. 132).
Yet how remarkable is the skill with which he works out his so perverse ideal! His melodies, however they may lack lyrical quality, are always of definite contour and arresting individuality, and frequently of an odd half-insidious, half-challenging appeal. Though Mr. Hadow's charge that "time after time he ruins his cause by subordinating beauty to emphasis, and is so anxious to impress that he forgets how to charm" is undoubtedly just, yet equally true is his further remark that "his sense of rhythm was, at the time when he lived, without parallel in the history of music." Thanks to this sense of rhythm he entirely avoided those wall-paper patterns which make much of the music of romanticism so formally monotonous, and he attained often a splendidly complex, though generally slightly mechanical, organization of phrases. The idée fixe is a good example of this prosodic elasticity. It consists of an eight-measure phrase balanced by one of seven measures, four phrases of four measures each in climactic sequence, and a codetta made up of a pair of two-measure phrases and a final phrase of five measures; and with all this variety, the unity of the tune as a whole is unimpeachable. The melody of the song "La Captive" (see Figure XXVI) is most fascinating in its irregular regularity, in the perfect naturalness with which three-measure and two-measure groups alternate and intertwine. In fact, Berlioz is a master of what in poetry we call versification.