His real claim to distinction as a master of the orchestra, however, rests not upon his extravagances, but upon his wonderfully delicate, unerring instinct for the capacities of the common instruments for tone color, both alone and in combination. It has been well said of him that he "thought orchestrally," that with him "the tone color was an essential part of the original design." The themes of the "Dance of Sprites" and the "Dance of Sylphs," in the "Damnation of Faust" (see Figure XXVII), are not merely "tunes," in the generic sense of the word, adaptable to any medium; the first is distinctively a piccolo tune, the second a violin melody. This instinctive sense of what each member of the orchestral family can best do gives Berlioz's sound-mass an unrivalled clarity, felicity, and distinction; it enables him to solve every problem that arises in a quite unconventional way, proceeding, without regard to tradition, to the precise timbre he has imagined, with the economy and certainty of a master. His scores are apt to look rather empty, because he allows so many instruments to remain silent; but they do not sound empty, for each tone is placed where it will "tell" to the utmost, yet without blurring any other. The two dances just mentioned are models of this kind of discretion, as also is the Ball Scene in the "Symphonie Fantastique," in which the variety of the combinations obtained from a few instruments is surprising. First the violins alone play the tune, accompanied by the other strings (page 37 in the full score); then (page 39) the accompaniment is shared between the strings on the first beat of the measure, two harps on the second beat, and the wood wind on the third; next (page 42) second violins, violas, and 'cellos unite on the melody, the wood wind and a cornet emphasize the accent, the first violin embroiders a delicate turn at the end of each measure, and the basses pluck insistent eighth-notes; and finally all the wood wind and the harps take up the tune (at page 47) to an accompaniment of horns and harps. The marvel of it is that all these tonal schemes are of such a perfect elasticity, such a brilliant lightness; this is musical champagne, that makes most other scores seem vapid and heavy, like wine too long uncorked.
The same intellectual ingenuity, curiously dissociated from emotional earnestness, which made Berlioz so clever a melodist and so inimitable a master of orchestral effects, enabled him also to achieve those innovations in the general scheme and intention of instrumental music on which his historical importance mainly depends. By discerning that, although the principle of coherence in all classical and lyrico-romantic music was the interplay and logical evolution of melodies or themes, that is, of purely musical elements, yet a composition might be unified rather by the interplay of characters and events, or in other words of dramatic motives, of which the music was merely representative, he opened the way for Liszt and the modern program composers. He thus became the pioneer of that realistic movement which in our own day has assumed such prominence, providing, as early as 1830, in the "Symphonie Fantastique," which is essentially a realistic work, with program and leading motives, the prototype of many famous modern masterpieces.
The most striking, and to us nowadays the most familiar, of all applications of this scheme of dramatic form is of course that of Wagner in his music-dramas. So far as Wagner's art was conscious it was planned entirely from the dramatic point of view. In the matter of tune he laid stress on "emotive expression," to borrow once more M. Goblot's term, rather than on symmetry of form, discarding regular phrase-balance and definite metre in favor of a loosely knit recitative, quickly responsive to all changes of mood, which he called "infinite melody." So far as definite musical figures appeared at all, they were conceived, not as having any intrinsic value, but as standing for extra-musical ideas: that is, they were not "subjects" or "themes," they were "leading-motives." The larger forms underwent a similar modification; the Italian aria, consisting of a melody, a second contrasting melody, and a repetition of the first, was discarded, in spite of its architectonic beauty, as being undramatic, since action never repeats itself, but ceaselessly changes. Even in purely instrumental pieces the principle of coherence became the imitation of a natural series of events or ideas. One looks in vain, in the "Funeral March" in "Götterdämmerung," for the kind of thematic development which makes so splendidly organic the "Funeral March" of Beethoven's "Eroica Symphony"; the unity of Wagner's piece depends on its being the narration of the events in the life of a single hero, Siegfried. The Prelude to "Lohengrin," though incidentally a masterpiece of purely musical structure, was conceived as a tone-picture of the descent from heaven, and the return thither, of an angel host bearing the Holy Grail. A more extreme case is the Prelude to the "Rheingold," in which there is no musical structure at all, the whole piece being written upon one unchanging harmony; the motive there is entirely pictorial. Finally, the descriptive and imitative elements in expression are prominent in such characteristic Wagnerian passages as the fire-music and the "Waldweben."
Wagner has thus become the standard instance of a musician dominated by a dramatic ideal, and has proved conclusively the powers of music associated with action. But this "music associated with action," it must be noted, is not, strictly speaking, any longer music at all, but a new art, to which its creator gave the name of music-drama: it appeals not only to the ear through sounds, but to the eye through scenery and actors, and to the understanding through language. To apply the principles which naturally dominate so composite an art as this to the writing of pure instrumental music is a daring and a questionable innovation, which we owe to Berlioz and Liszt. It is one thing to compose in this style a work to be played, sung, and acted in an opera-house, and quite another to cut from the same stuff a symphony to be performed by staid musicians in conventional dress in the concert-room. That Wagner himself was well aware of the difference is shown by a passage in his essay on Liszt's Symphonic Poems, striking enough to be quoted at some length.
"I pardon everybody," says the great music-dramatist, "who has doubted the benefit of a new art-form for instrumental music, for I must own to having so fully shared that doubt as to join those who saw in our program-music a most unedifying spectacle—whereby I felt the drollness of my situation, as I myself was classed among just the program-musicians, and cast into one pot with them. Whilst listening to the best of this sort ... it had always happened that I so completely lost the musical thread that by no manner of exertion could I re-find and knit it up again. This occurred to me quite recently with the love-scene, so entrancing in its principal motives, of our friend Berlioz's 'Romeo and Juliet Symphony'; the great fascination which had come over me during the development of the chief motive was dispelled in the further course of the movement, and sobered down to an undeniable malaise; I discovered at once that, while I had lost the musical thread (i.e. the logical and lucid play of definite motives), I now had to hold on to scenic motives not present before my eye, nor even so much as indicated in the program.... The musician looks quite away from the incidents of ordinary life, entirely upheaves its details and its accidents, and sublimates whatever lies within it to its quintessence of emotional content—to which alone can music give a voice, and music only. A true musical poet, therefore, would have presented Berlioz with this scene in a thoroughly compact ideal form."
Wagner here puts his finger on the chief points of weakness in Berlioz's ingenious scheme. The lack of what he calls the musical thread, and defines most concisely as "the logical and lucid play of definite motives," is indeed a most serious defect, as we have already seen in the case of the "Symphonie Fantastique." Because of it, the composer's best effects seem fragmentary and uncoördinated; however we enjoy his brilliant, affecting, or powerful moments, we miss the sense of inexorable progress, of deliberate accumulation of force, of efflorescence of melodic germs as slow and as steady as a process of nature, which is so overwhelming in the music of Bach and Beethoven. His music is almost always interesting rather than beautiful; he lets our attention dissipate itself upon picturesque details, instead of seizing and concentrating it by the grandeur of his design, the symmetry of his forms, the logic of their evolution. His structures, considered as wholes, however massive and imposing, are fundamentally incoherent; his rhythms, for all their ingenuity, are over-whimsical, restless; his harmony is often awkward, strained, non-sequacious. He cares less for purity than for pungency of style, and seems to be entirely unconscious of the large alloy of incongruity and anticlimax that adulterates his finest conceptions.
These shortcomings were by no means accidental; their cause lay deep in his peculiar temperament. "Berlioz's disposition," says one of his critics with penetration,[36] "was instinctively somewhat inclined to the grotesque; he had not that inborn reverence for the proprieties of nature which is the secret of the highest art achievement. He set his individuality ... above immutable law." Indeed, Berlioz had more than the usual share of the romanticist's indifference to abstract beauty in art, and of the romanticist's impatience of the discipline which alone gives command of it. When he was a boy he showed on every occasion his "unquestioning intolerance of prescriptive right"; he dismissed Lesueur's harmony as "antediluvian," and Reicha's counterpoint as "barbarous." When he was a man he frankly expressed his boredom at the most perfect of musical forms: "A theme without a fugue," he writes in one of his letters, "is rare good luck"; in another he exclaims, "May God preserve you from fugues with four themes on a choral!"; and his attitude towards Bach, the touchstone of all musical taste, is in strange contrast with that of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and indeed almost all of his great contemporaries. "When I was in St. Petersburg," he tells us, "they played me a triple concerto of Bach's.... I do not think they intended to annoy me." In the light of such a confession we are not surprised to find him, in the famous passage in the autobiography wherein he sets forth his pretensions as a composer, making no claim to the highest qualities, to grandeur, restraint, poise, proportion, beauty, but contenting himself with the words, "The dominant qualities of my music are passionate expression, internal fire, rhythmic animation, and unexpected changes."
On the other hand, if he was in some degree forced into the dramatic vein by deficiencies on the musical side, he had also some strong positive qualifications for the work he undertook. A degree of literary cultivation rare among musicians gave him a large choice of motives to draw upon. The symphony, "Romeo and Juliet," the overture, "King Lear," the opera, "Beatrice and Benedict," the "Tempest" fantasia in "Lelio," and some minor pieces, all owe their inspiration to Shakespeare; Byron is drawn upon for the "Corsair" overture and the symphony, "Harold in Italy," and Scott for the overtures, "Waverley" and "Rob Roy"; Goethe for "The Damnation of Faust"; the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini for the overture which bears his name, and Virgil's "Æneid" for the opera, "The Trojans at Carthage." It is true that both in his choice and his utilization of texts he was often characteristically perverse. He considered Thomas Moore one of the great pathetic poets of the world; he garbled "Romeo and Juliet"; he placed Faust in Hungary in order to introduce the Rakoczy March; he made the demons in "Faust" sing in Swedenborg's infernal language—"Irimiru Karabrao! Has! Has! Tradioun Marexil firtrudinxé burrudixé" ...; in his own programs he perpetrated, with entire gravity, the most mirth-provoking medleys of the sublime and the ridiculous. Yet in spite of his lack of humor, and even at times of ordinary common sense, he brought to the planning and execution of his fantastic conceptions an extraordinary cleverness.
Berlioz is, however, even as a dramatist, open to severe criticism, the nature of which is again suggested by Wagner. In pointing out that in the absence of a purely musical thread one has to hold on to "scenic motives not present to the eye, nor even so much as indicated in the program," Wagner touches upon one of the ineradicable defects of all program-music, its ambiguity. Doubtless it is quite possible, and mildly amusing, to follow, on hearing the "Symphonie Fantastique," the general outlines of the story, but did Berlioz suppose that any one would be able to recognize in his music, otherwise often unintelligible, the details of the "plot"? If so, he was certainly overrating the descriptive powers of sound, and placing too much dependence on the definiteness of a medium which is by nature vague and indeterminate. He was himself conscious of the difficulty; but with his usual arrogance he attributed it, not to any shortcoming in his own art, but to his audience's lack of imagination. To the sixth division of the score of "Romeo and Juliet" he appends this foot-note: "The public has no imagination; pieces which address themselves solely to the imagination have consequently no public. The following instrumental scene is in this predicament, and I think it should be suppressed except when the symphony is to be heard by an audience of the élite, to whom the fifth act of Shakespeare's tragedy, with Garrick's dénoûement, is extremely familiar, and whose poetic sentiment is very elevated." The thought that possibly a piece of music should not address itself solely to the pictorial imagination does not seem to have occurred to him.
When Berlioz's music does not fail of its effect through being ambiguous, it is very apt to lose itself in triviality; indeed, this, as we have already seen,[37] is one of the imminent dangers besetting all program-music. Why is it that we are rather more inclined to smile than to shudder at the piled-up horrors of the "Witches' Sabbath"? Why does the elaborate machinery which Berlioz assembles in order to stun us leave us so often rather amused or bored? Why is it that we enjoy more than we resent that parody of his style perpetrated by Arnal, in which we are asked "to understand from the second repetition of the first allegro how my hero ties his cravat"? Is it not that there is involved in the programmistic method a subtle insult to our intelligence, that we instinctively rebel against the use of musical tones, by nature so uniquely expressive of inner verities, for the mere delineation of external objects? Wagner seems to think so when, in the last part of his criticism, he says that the musician "looks quite away from the incidents of ordinary life ... and sublimates whatever lies within it to its quintessence of emotional-content." Bourget certainly thinks so when he commands the artist, "Sois belle et tais-toi."