MUSICAL STUDIES
BERLIOZ, ROMANTIC AND CLASSIC
I
It is fairly safe to say that—with the possible exception of Liszt—there is no musician about whom people differ so strongly as about Berlioz. His case is, indeed, unique. We are pretty well agreed as to the relative positions of the other men; roughly speaking, all cultivated musicians would put Wagner and Brahms and Beethoven in the first rank of composers, and Mendelssohn, Grieg, and Dvořàk in the second or third. Even in the case of a disputed problem like Strauss, the argument among those who know his work is not, I take it, as to his being a musician of the first rank, but as to the precise position he occupies among the others of that limited regiment. Upon Berlioz, however, the world seems unable to make up its mind. The dispute here is not as to where he stands among the great ones, but whether he really belongs to the great ones at all. Though there is no absolute unanimity of opinion upon the total work of, say, Wagner or Beethoven—no complete agreement as to the amount of weakness that is bound up with their strength—there is at all events perfect unanimity of opinion that Wagner and Beethoven are of the royal line. But we have Berlioz extolled to the skies by one section of competent musicians, while another section can scarcely speak of him politely; he really seems to create a kind of physical nausea in them; and some of them even deny his temperament to have been really musical. There is surely nothing in the history of music to parallel the situation. The difference of opinion upon him, be it observed, is quite another thing from the frequent and quite excusable perplexity that men feel over a contemporary composer. Men drift widely apart over Wagner while he is alive; but the next generation, at all events, sees him practically through the same eyes. The quarrel over Berlioz is not a contemporary quarrel; the bulk of his most significant work had all appeared before 1850, and yet here we are, half a century after that time, still debating whether he is really one of the immortals. For many people Schumann's old question, "Are we to regard him as a genius, or only a musical adventurer?" still remains unanswered.
On the whole—looking for a moment only at the external aspect of the case—the current is now flowing not from but towards him. Even putting aside the exceptional spasm of 1903, the centenary of his birth, he probably gets more performances now than he ever did. Messrs. Breitkopf and Härtel are bringing out a magnificent complete edition of his works in score, superbly edited by Weingartner, the great conductor, and Charles Malherbe, Archivist of the Paris Opera; while in the admirable little Donajowski editions the full scores of the Symphonie fantastique, Harold en Italie, Roméo et Juliette, and half-a-dozen of the overtures, can now be had for a total expenditure of a few shillings. Publishers do not generally take to bringing out full scores, particularly at very low prices, unless there is some demand for the works; and I think we may take it that just now there is a quickening interest in Berlioz. Yet all the while the critical war goes on, without signs of compromise on either side. The attitude of a great many people is of course to be explained partly by imperfect acquaintance with Berlioz's work, partly by their having revolted against him at the outset and never settled down to ask themselves whether their first impressions did not need revising. It is not every one who has either the candour or the capacity for hard and patient work of Weingartner, who has placed on record his own progress from the traditional view of Berlioz as "a great colourist, the founder of modern orchestration, a brilliant writer, and, in fact, almost everything else except a composer of inspiration and melody," to the view that Berlioz is one of the great masters, rich in feeling, in beauty, in inventiveness. Many worthy people no doubt took their cue from Wagner, who, besides giving a nonsensical pseudo-analysis of Berlioz in Opera and Drama, referred to him disparagingly in a well-known letter to Liszt. It is tolerably clear, however, that Wagner knew comparatively little of Berlioz at that time, and that in running down Benvenuto Cellini and La Damnation de Faust he was only indulging that unfortunate habit of his of expressing himself very positively upon subjects he knew nothing about. [1] But put aside all the criticism of him that comes from imperfect knowledge—and it must be remembered that up to quite recently it was not easy to get a perfect knowledge of him, for his scores were rather scarce, and so badly printed as to make the reading of them a trial—Wagner's and we are still left face to face with a certain amount of good critical intelligence that cannot, do what it will, take to Berlioz's music. And since criticism is, or ought to be, concerned not only with the psychological processes that go to make a work of art, but also with the psychological processes that make us judge it in this way or that—it is worth while trying to discover what it is in Berlioz that makes so many worthy people quite unsympathetic towards him.
II
Let us first of all look at him biographically and historically, as he was in himself and in his relations to his contemporaries. His is perhaps the strangest story in all the records of music. In contrast to musicians like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, and a score of others, who grew up from childhood in an atmosphere saturated with music, Berlioz is born in a country town that is practically destitute of musical life. Even the piano is not cultivated there, the harp and guitar being almost the sole instruments known; in 1808—five years after the birth of Berlioz—there is still only one piano in the Department. There is no teacher of music in the place; Berlioz's father ultimately combines with other residents to bring over for this purpose a second violinist from the theatre at Lyons. Although the music in the boy cannot quite be kept down, for nearly the first twenty years of his life he is, to all intents and purposes, ignorant of the elements of technique, and never hears a bar of first-rate music. "When I arrived in Paris in 1820," [2] he says, "I had never yet set foot in a theatre; all I knew of instrumental music was the quartets of Pleyel with which the four amateurs composing the Philharmonic Society of my native town used to regale me each Sunday after mass; and I had no other idea of dramatic music than what I had been able to get in running through a collection of old operatic airs arranged with an accompaniment for the guitar." Yet, untutored as he was, and practically ignorant of even the elements of harmony, he had from his boyhood been writing music. The opening melody of the Symphonie fantastique was really written by Berlioz in his twelfth year, to some verses from Florian's Estelle; [3] and we know of other boyish compositions, fragments of which have been conserved in some of his later works. It may not be absolutely true, as M. Edmond Hippeau says, that until the age of twenty-three he was "ignorant of the most elementary principles of music"; but at all events he was just beginning to learn these principles at an age when nine other composers out of ten have left far behind them all the drudgery of the apprentice. In Paris he does indeed study after a fashion; but it is characteristic of him that he gets most of his musical experience from the performances at the Opera, and from a diligent reading of the scores of Gluck in the library of the Conservatoire.