Figure XXVI.
His skill in orchestration is notorious. "Berlioz claims attention first and foremost," says one critic, "as a master of orchestration, perhaps the most ingenious and versatile among all modern composers";[34] and another ranks him with Beethoven, Wagner, and Dvořák as "one of the four greatest masters of instrumentation the world has ever seen."[35] Unfortunately even in this department he could not entirely resist that craving for sensationalism which was the characteristic vice of his temperament; so that his name has become associated in many minds with merely noisy or eccentric effects that are far from representing him at his best. He loved to pile Pelion upon Ossa, scored his Requiem for sixteen trombones, sixteen trumpets, five ophicleides, twelve horns, eight pairs of kettle-drums, two bass drums, and a gong, in addition to the usual resources, and told with pride of its having frightened one of the listeners into a fit. He was frequently rallied for what Mr. Nordau would call his "megalomania." "Prince Metternich," he tells us in his memoirs, "said to me one day: 'Are you not the man, monsieur, who composes music for five hundred performers?' To which I replied: 'Not always, monseigneur; I sometimes write for four hundred and fifty.'"
Love of the bizarre and the unusual led him often to employ rare instruments, or to use the ordinary ones in freakish ways. The harp, the English horn, and the cornet figure frequently in his scores, and he likes to direct that the horns be put in bags, that the cymbal be suspended and struck with a stick, that the drums be played with sticks covered with sponge. In one instance he ventures a duet between a piccolo and a bass trombone. He describes, in a letter from Germany, a trick by which a trombone player sounds four tones at once, and adds in all seriousness: "Acousticians ought to explain this new phenomenon in the resonance of sonorous tubes; we musicians ought to study it thoroughly and turn it to account when the opportunity presents itself." He was one of the earliest and most indefatigable champions of the valve horns and trumpets made by Sax of Paris, and also, by a less happy inspiration, made propaganda for the cornet à pistons, which is in comparison with its noble cousin, the trumpet, a most vulgar instrument. He was a daring, but not always a cautious, innovator, frequently seeming to set a higher value upon novelty than upon inherent worth.
Figure XXVII.