So again with the harmony of Berlioz. Here the peculiarity of his style has often been commented on, with its odd way of getting from one chord to another, its curious trick of conceiving the harmony in solid blocks, that succeed one another without flowing into one another—much as in certain modern Dutch pictures the colours stand away from each other as if a rigid line always lay between them and prevented their being blended by the atmosphere. The general explanation of this peculiarity of Berlioz's harmony is the easiest one—that it comes from his imperfect technical education. There may be something in this, but a little reflection will show that it is a long way from being the complete explanation. In the first place, one needs scarcely any "training" to avoid some of the progressions that Berlioz constantly uses; the mere hearing of other music would be sufficient to establish unconsciously the routine way of getting from one chord to another; and if Berlioz always takes another way, it can only be because the peculiarity of his diction has its root in a peculiarity of thought. In the second place, the harmonic oddities are really not so numerous in his earliest as in his later works. The melodies of the Waverley, Francs Juges, and King Lear overtures and of many of the earlier songs are usually harmonised more in the ordinary manner than the melodies of the works of his middle and last epochs; which seems to show again that his harmonic style was rooted in his way of thinking, and became more pronounced as he grew older and more individual. In the third place, if the peculiarities of his harmony had been due to lack of education, one would have expected him, when in more mature years he revised an early work, to correct some of the so-called faults to which a wider experience must have opened his eyes. But it is quite clear that the matter never struck him in this way. In the new edition of his works we have some instructive examples. In 1850, for example, he revised one of his songs, Adieu, Bessy, which he had written in 1830. He has altered it in many ways, and made many improvements in the melody, in the phrasing, and in the accompaniment; but the sometimes odd harmonic sequences of the original version remain unchanged in the later. It clearly never struck him that there was anything odd about them; he had really seen his picture in that particular way; it was a question not so much of mere technique as of fundamental conception. In the fourth place, we must always remember that whatever Berlioz thought he thought in terms of the orchestra. He neither played nor understood the piano, and his writing is not piano writing. Now every one knows that many effects that seem strange or ugly on the piano are perfectly pleasurable on the orchestra, where they are set not in the one plane, as it were, but in different planes and different focuses. I fancy that when Berlioz imagined a melodic line or a harmonic combination he saw it not merely as a melody or a harmony but as a piece of colour as well; and the movement of the parts was not only a shifting of lines but a weaving of colours. Many things of his that are ugly or meaningless on the piano have a beauty of their own when heard, as he conceived them, on the orchestra, set in different depths, as it were, with the toning effect of atmosphere between them; not all standing in the same line in the foreground, with the one white light of the piano making confusion among their colour-values.
There is good reason for believing, then, that much of Berlioz's peculiarity of style is far less the result of lack of education than is generally believed, and that more of it must be attributed to a peculiar constitution of brain that made him really see things just in the way he has depicted them.
Among these early songs and other works there are some that show great strength and charm and originality of expression, such as Toi qui l'aimas, verse des pleurs, La belle voyageuse, Le coucher du soleil, and Le pêcheur (that was afterwards incorporated in Lélio). His two youthful overtures, the Waverley and the Francs Juges, though relatively unsubtle in their working-out—for he had little feeling for the symphonic form pure and simple—are yet very individual, while parts of the Francs Juges in particular are exceedingly strong. Then the apprentice makes rapid strides on to mastery. The year 1828 may be taken as the turning-point in his career. His unsuccessful scena for the Prix de Rome—Herminie—exhibits remarkable ardour of conception. There is much that is very youthful in it; but it is decidedly individual, and above all it shows a feeling for rhythm to which there had been no parallel in French music up to that date. The next year saw another Prix de Rome scena—Cléopâtre—of which the same description will mostly hold good. The rhythmic scene is just as delicate, the melody is becoming purer and stronger, and we have in the aria Grands Pharaons a really fine piece of dramatic writing. About the same time he wrote the original eight scenes from Faust, containing such gems as the chorus of sylphs, the song of the rat, the song of the flea, Margaret's ballad of the King of Thule, her "Romance," and the serenade of Mephistopheles. Berlioz's musical genius was now entering upon its happiest phase; never, perhaps, did it work so easily and so joyously as in 1829 and the next seven or eight years. It was about 1829, too, that his orchestration began to be so distinctive; one can see him reaching out to new effects in the Cléopâtre, the chorus of the sylphs, the ballad of the King of Thule, the Ballet des Ombres and the fantasia on The Tempest.
This increasing mastery of his thoughts coincided with the epoch of his most intense nervous excitement, in which Henrietta Smithson played the part of the match to the gunpowder. So there came about the typical Romantic Berlioz of the Symphonie fantastique and Lélio, moving about in the world with abnormally heightened senses, his brain on fire, turning waking life into a nightmare, dreaming of blood and fantastic horrors. He exploited this mad psychology to its fullest in the last two movements of the symphony; after that the volcano lost a good deal of its lurid grandeur, and in Lélio we get rather less molten lava and rather more ashes than we want. Some of the music of Lélio—the ballad of the fisher, the Chœur des ombres, the Chant de bonheur, the Harpe éolienne—is among the finest Berlioz ever wrote; but the scheme as a whole, with its extraordinary prose tirades, is surely the maddest thing ever projected by a musician. Here was the young Romantic in all his imbecile, flamboyant glory, longing to be a brigand, to indulge in orgies of blood and tears, to drink his mistress' health out of the skull of his rival, and all the rest of it. But after all there is very little of this in Berlioz's music. We meet with it again in the "orgy of brigands" in the Harold en Italie; and whether that really belongs to 1834 or was written two or three years earlier, at the time when the hyperæmic brain was working at its wildest in the Symphonie fantastique and Lélio, [14] matters comparatively little. In any case, the madness ends in 1834 with Harold.
And then, with almost startling suddenness, a new Berlioz comes into view. We first see the change in the scena Le Cinq Mai—a song on the death of the Emperor Napoleon, to words by Béranger—which is dated 1834 by M. Adolphe Jullien and 1832 by Herr Weingartner and M. Malherbe. The precise date is unimportant. The essential fact is that Berlioz's brain was now acquiring what it had hitherto lacked—it was beginning to be touched with a philosophic sense of the reality of things. He had, of course, in much of his earlier work, written seriously and beautifully; but Le Cinq Mai has qualities beyond these. His songs La captive (1832) and Sara la baigneuse (1833?) carry on the line from the earlier songs and overtures; what we get in addition, in Le Cinq Mai, is a gravity and ordered intensity of conception that as a whole are absent from the earlier works. He is becoming less of an egoist, more capable of voicing the thought of humanity as a whole; the Romanticist is making way for the complete human being. In the Nuits d'Été (1834) there is a larger spirit than in any of his previous songs. Between 1835 and 1838 we have three noble works—Benvenuto Cellini, the Requiem, and Roméo et Juliette; and to no previous work of Berlioz would the epithet "noble" be really applicable. The change is not so much a musical as an intellectual—we may almost say ethical—one. Look at him, for example, in the opening of the Requiem. All the madness, the pose, the egoism of the Symphonie fantastique and its brethren have disappeared. Berlioz now has an eye for something more in life than his own unshorn locks and his sultry amours. He no longer thinks himself the centre of the universe; he no longer believes in the Berliozcentric theory, and does not write with one eye on the mirror half the time. In place of all this we have a Berlioz who has sunk his aggressive subjectivity and learned to regard life objectively. His spirit touched to finer issues, he sings, not Berlioz, but humanity as a whole. He is now what every great artist is instinctively—a philosopher as well as a singer; by the Requiem he earns his right to stand among the serious, brooding spirits of the earth. So again in the final scene of Roméo et Juliette, where he rises to loftier heights than he could ever have attained while he was in the throes of his egoistic Romanticism. Here again, as in the Requiem, he speaks with the authority of the seer as well as the voice of the orator; there is the thrill of profound conviction in the music, the note of inspired comprehension of men and nature as a whole. In a word, the old Berlioz has gone; a new Berlioz stands in his place, wiser than of old, purified and chastened by his experiences, artist and thinker in one.
X
In 1838, then, everything seemed of the happiest promise for his art. But that promise, alas, was not fulfilled so amply as might have been hoped for. Whatever the real cause may have been, Berlioz, as we have seen, now slackened greatly in his musical production. It could not have been wholly due to his feuilleton writing, for he was never so busy with this as in the seven years onward from 1833 (the year in which he married Henrietta Smithson, and had to earn money in some way or other). He complains to Humbert Ferrand that his journalism leaves him little time to write music, but the facts are that he was really keeping up a very good output. At the end of what I have called his first epoch he received some large sums of money—4000 francs for the Requiem (1837), 20,000 francs from Paganini for Harold en Italie (1838), and 10,000 francs for the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840)—enabling him to give up journalism and to travel. He was away frequently between 1841 and 1855, but not enough to account for the singularly small amount of music he wrote—an amount that becomes still smaller in the later years.
We cannot, I think, resist the conclusion that even between 1840 and 1855 the seeds of his illness were in him and affecting his powers of work. So far as can be ascertained from his letters, he became aware of his malady about 1855, but there is no warrant for thinking it actually began then; his father had suffered from the same complaint, and the son was evidently a doomed man. It is about 1855 that his letters begin to show what ravages his awful malady—a neuralgia of the intestines, he calls it—was making in him. The atrocious pain weakened him through and through; then the springs of energy within him were still further relaxed by the quantities of opium he had to take. He lost, at times, even his interest in art. In November 1856 he speaks to the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein of "the horrible moments of disgust with which my illness inspires me," during which "I find everything I have written" (he is working at Les Troyens) "cold, dull, stupid, tasteless; I have a great mind to burn it all." A month later he writes that he has been so ill that he could not go on with his score. Thus the melancholy record continues in letter after letter: he is ill "in soul, in body, in heart, in head;" an access of his "damned neuralgia" keeps him on his back for sixteen hours; "I cannot walk, I only drag myself along; I cannot think, I only ruminate;" "I live in an absolute isolation of soul; I do nothing but suffer eight or nine hours a day, without hope of any kind, wanting only to sleep, and appreciating the truth of the Chinese proverb—it is better to be sitting than standing, lying than sitting, asleep than awake, and dead than asleep;" "my neurosis grows and has now settled in the head; sometimes I stagger like a drunken man and dare not go out alone;" "these obstinate sufferings enervate me, brutalise me; I become more and more like an animal, indifferent to everything, or almost everything;" his doctors tell him he has "a general inflammation of the nervous system," and that he must "live like an oyster, without thought and without sensation;" some days he has "attacks of hysteria like a young girl;" "Mon Dieu, que je suis triste!"; "I suffer each day so terribly, from seven in the morning till four in the afternoon, that during such crises my thoughts are completely confused;" he takes so long over the writing of Béatrice et Benedict because, owing to his illness, his musical ideas come to him with extreme slowness—while after he has written it he forgets it, and when he hears it it sounds quite new to him. To his other correspondents it is always the same pitiful story: "On certain days I cannot write ten consecutive lines; it takes me sometimes four days to finish an article."
It is impossible to believe that so serious a disorder began only in 1855, when Berlioz first became fully conscious of it; it must have been in him years before, and must even then have affected his powers of work. [15] But such music as he did find energy to write is eloquent of the new condition of his being. Not only bodily but mentally Berlioz was a changed man—a point that should be insisted on in view of the traditional misunderstanding of him. I have already remarked upon the Berlioz "legend" that is generally accepted, a legend founded solely on the Berlioz of twenty-five or thirty. Heine gave perhaps the finest expression to this aspect of him in the passage in which he speaks of him as "a colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle, such as once existed, they say, in the primitive world. Yes, the music of Berlioz, in general, has for me something primitive, almost antediluvian; it sets me dreaming of gigantic species of extinct animals, of mammoths, of fabulous empires with fabulous sins, of all kinds of impossibilities piled one on top of the other; these magic accents recall to us Babylon, the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the marvels of Nineveh, the audacious edifices of Mizraim, such as we see them in the pictures of the English painter Martin." That is not a bad description, in spite of its verbal fantasy, of the Berlioz of the last two movements of the Symphonie fantastique, the orgy of brigands in Harold en Italie, the ride to the abyss in Faust, and, let us even say, the "Tuba mirum" of the Requiem. But it is only a quarter, a tenth, of the real Berlioz. Yet the old legend still goes on; even so careful a student as Mr. W. H. Hadow has just said, in his article in the new "Grove's Dictionary," that "his imagination seems always at white heat; his eloquence pours forth in a turbid, impetuous torrent which levels all obstacles and overpowers all restraint. It is the fashion to compare him with Victor Hugo, and on one side at any rate the comparison is just. Both were artists of immense creative power, both were endowed with an exceptional gift of oratory, both ranged at will over the entire gamut of human passion. But here resemblance ends. Beside the extravagance of Berlioz, Hugo is reticent; beside the technical errors of the musician the verse of the poet is as faultless as a Greek statue."
One really gets rather tired of this perpetual harping upon the extravagance of Berlioz. The picture is pure caricature, not a portrait; one or two features in the physiognomy are selected and exaggerated, posed in the strongest light, and factitiously made to appear as the essential points of the man. Yet a baby with any knowledge of Berlioz could demonstrate the falsity of the picture. Where is the "extravagance," the want of "reticence," in the Waverley overture, the Roi Lear overture, the first three movements of the Symphonie fantastique, the twenty or thirty songs, the bulk of Faust, the bulk of Harold en Italie, the bulk of Lélio, the three fine pieces that make up the Tristia, the Cinq Mai, the bulk of the Requiem, Benvenuto Cellini, Roméo et Juliette, the noble Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, the Carnaval romain overture, the Enfance du Christ, Béatrice et Benedict, or Les Troyens? Out of all these thousands of pages, how ridiculously few of them deserve the epithet of "extravagance"; of how many of them is it true that Berlioz's "eloquence pours forth in a turbid, impetuous torrent which levels all obstacles and overpowers all restraint"?