Musical Studies

by Ernest Newman

This is not a piece of merely literary exaggeration, for time after time in his letters we come across corroborative evidence that Berlioz was really affected by music in this way. He thus surpasses in nervous extravagance the most abnormal of the young poets and painters of his time. And as with them the susceptibility of their physical organisms led to a new sympathy with things, a new tenderness, a new pity, so did the weakness of Berlioz lead him to the discovery of shades of emotion that had never before found expression in music. Madame de Staël's remark, that "la littérature romantique ... se sert de nos impressions personnelles pour nous émouvoir," had a wider application than she imagined. The French Romantic was a new type in art; in most cases a nervous sufferer himself, he had glimpses of a whole world of human pain and pathos that were denied his forerunners. The great figures of the eighteenth century are for the most part objective, travelling by the way of reason rather than that of emotion, philosophers rather than artists, living in the central stream of things, and with a broad, clear outlook on the actual affairs of their own day. Their very sentiment is a different thing from the sentiment of the later generation; it is more under control, has less heart and more brain in it, is less suggestive of an overwhelming surge along the nerves. Only now and again in the literature of the eighteenth century do we catch a foreshadowing of that species of quivering emotion which found, sometimes only too easily, expression in the Romantics. We have it in a noteworthy passage of Diderot: "Le premier serment que se firent deux êtres de chair, ce fut au pied d'un rocher qui tombait en poussière; ils attestèrent de leur constance un ciel qui n'est pas un instant le même; tout passait en eux, autour d'eux, et ils croyaient leurs cœurs affranchis de vicissitudes. O enfants! toujours enfants!" This, in the literature of its time, is like a lyric of Heine appearing among the pages of Lessing, a song of Schumann in the middle of a score of Gluck. We have something of the same tone again, a similar adumbration of the romantic spirit, here and there in the Rêveries of Rousseau. But it is in the Romantics that we first find the full expression of that new tremor of feeling that comes from the sense of the weakness of our poor flesh, the sense of the mortality of our clay, our hourly nearness to corruption, our community with everything that suffers and perishes.

VI

Before coming to consider his music, let us complete the study of Berlioz as an organism by examining his prose, where we shall find many things that throw light on his structure. The assistance given to the student of musical psychology by the prose writings of musicians is so great, that one could almost wish that every composer of any note had left the world a volume or two of criticism or of autobiography. They would not necessarily have added very much to our positive knowledge of life or art; but a book is such an unconscious revelation of its writer, he shows himself in it so faithfully and so completely, no matter how much he may desire to pose or deceive, that the psychologist is able to reconstruct the man's mind from it as the scientist can reconstruct in imagination the body of an animal from a few of its bones. One does not lay much store, for example, by the actual contents of the volumes of prose which Wagner was unkind enough to bequeath to us; but after all one would not willingly let them die, for they are of the utmost help to the study of Wagner, indirectly, if not directly, throwing sidelights on him of which he was quite unconscious. The prose of Berlioz has greater intrinsic interest. Deeply as he said he loathed his journalistic work, he was after all a born journalist, a fluent writer, a cynical wit, an accomplished story-teller in certain genres, a master of polished and mordant irony. My present purpose, however, is not to attempt an appreciation of Berlioz's prose as a whole, but to call attention to certain curious elements in it that have not, so far as I am aware, been pointed out before, and that are extremely interesting to the student of so strange and complex a personality as Berlioz.

Readers of Hennequin's fine, if not quite convincing, essay on Flaubert in Quelques Écrivains Français, will remember the attempt to exhibit the structure and functioning of the novelist's brain by dissection of his prose. Flaubert, he shows, tends always to write thus and thus; he has a vocabulary of such and such a kind, and he tends to build up words in such and such a way. Proceeding from this basis, Hennequin goes on to examine Flaubert's construction of his sentences, then of his paragraphs, then of his chapters, then of his novels, and thus to explain the final form of the books in terms of a fundamental intellectual structure that has been conditioned by a certain verbal faculty. Hennequin, I think, pushes his method rather too far here, making blindly for his thesis regardless of all that may be urged against it; but on the whole the essay is a novel and valuable contribution to a neglected science—the study of a man's brain through the medium of his forms of expression. Now any one who reads critically through the prose works of Berlioz must be struck by certain elements in the prose that seem to give the key to much that is almost inexplicable in his music and his character. "Extravagant," "theatrical," "bizarre"—these are the terms that have always been used of Berlioz. Sir Hubert Parry takes the easy course of attributing his theatricalism to his being a Frenchman, oblivious of the fact that the French disliked it and ridiculed it more than any other nation. The early prose of Berlioz indicates that he was a man of a cerebral structure that tended always to express itself extravagantly; a man who did not see things upon the ordinary level of earth quite so clearly as shapes in cloud and on mountain-top.

The big effects at which he aimed in music were, indeed, only one form of manifestation of a curious faculty that was always leading him to the grandiose. The ordinary orchestra, the ordinary chorus, the ordinary concert-room would never do for him; everything must be magnified, as it were, beyond life-size. Similarly in his prose, the ordinary similes, the ordinary metaphors rarely occur to him; the dilated brain can only express itself in a dilation of language. Thus one adjective is rarely enough for Berlioz; there must generally be at least three, and these of the most exaggerated kind. A thing is never beautiful or ugly for Berlioz; it is either divine or horrible. A scene in his early work, where Cleopatra reflects on the welcome to be given her by the Pharaohs entombed in the pyramids, is "terrible, frightful." His Francs Juges overture in one place is described as "monstrous, colossal, horrible." On another occasion he writes, "There is nothing so terribly frightful as my overture.... It is a hymn to despair, but the most despairing despair one can imagine—horrible and tender." Everywhere there is the same tumefaction of language. When he ponders over the memory of his first wife and her sufferings, he is overcome by "an immense, frightful, incommensurable, infinite pity." Towards the end of his life he is seized by "the furious desire for immense affections." He can hardly speak of anything that has moved him without this piling-up of the most tremendous adjectives in the language.

As might be expected, his imagery is of the same order; the very largest things in the universe are impressed into the service of his similes and metaphors. He speaks in one place of "those superhuman adagios, where the genius of Beethoven soars aloft, immense and solitary, like the colossal bird above the snowy summit of Chimborazo." He had never seen the bird above the summit of Chimborazo, but his brain reverts spontaneously to this conception in the effort to express the sensation of immensity and solitude given him by Beethoven's music. The pyramids, being conveniently large, frequently enter into his similes. "It needs a very rare order of genius to create the things that both artists and public can take to at once—things whose simplicity is in direct proportion to their mass, like the pyramids of Djizeh." "Yesterday," he writes after a certain performance of his works, "I had a pyramidal success." When the pyramids fail him he falls back on Ossian, or on Babylon and Nineveh. After having heard 6500 children's voices in St. Paul's, he writes, "It was, without comparison, the most imposing, the most Babylonian ceremony I had ever beheld." The "Tibi omnes" and the "Judex" of his Te Deum are "Babylonian, Ninivitish pieces." One night he hears the north wind "lament, moan, and howl like several generations in agony. My chimney resounds cavernously like a sixty-four feet organ-pipe. I have never been able to resist these Ossianic noises."

Occasionally the heaping of Pelion on Ossa becomes necessary in order to enable him to give the reader a faint impression of what he feels. Beethoven is "a Titan, an Archangel, a Throne, a Domination." When he is writing his hated feuilletons, "the lobes of my brain seem ready to crack asunder. I seem to have burning cinders in my veins." The scene of the benediction of the poniards in the Huguenots is a terrible piece, "written as it were in electric fluid by a gigantic Voltaic pile; it seems to be accompanied by the bursting of thunderbolts and sung by the tempests." A reminiscence of some incident in his career brings out this ejaculation—"Destruction, fire and thunder, blood and tears! my brain shrivels up in my skull as I think of these horrors!" His second love, he tells us, "appeared to me with Shakespeare, in the age of my virility, in the burning bush of a Sinai, in the midst of the clouds, the thunders, the lightnings of a poetry that was new to me."

All his youthful conceptions and desires were of this extravagant order. He writes in a letter of 1831, from Florence, "I should like to have gone into Calabria or Sicily, and enlisted in the ranks of some chief of bravi, even if I were to be no more than a mere brigand. Then at least I should have seen magnificent crimes, robberies, assassinations, rapes, conflagrations, instead of all these miserable little crimes, these mean perfidies that make one sick at heart. Yes, yes, that is the world for me: a volcano, rocks, rich spoils heaped up in caverns, a concert of cries of horror accompanied by an orchestra of pistols and carbines; blood and lacryma christi: a bed of lava rocked by earthquakes; come now, that's life!" [9] In the same year he has the idea of a colossal oratorio on the subject of "The Last Day of the World." There are to be three or four soloists, choruses, and two orchestras, one of sixty, the other of two or three hundred executants. This is the plan of the work: "Mankind having reached the ultimate degree of corruption, give themselves up to every kind of infamy; a sort of Antichrist governs them despotically. A few just men, directed by a prophet, are found amid the general depravation. The despot tortures them, steals their virgins, insults their beliefs, and commands their sacred books to be burnt in the midst of an orgy. The prophet comes to reproach him for his crimes, and announces the end of the world and the Last Judgment. The irritated despot has him thrown into prison, and, delivering himself up again to his impious pleasures, is surprised in the midst of a feast by the terrible trumpets of the Resurrection; the dead come out of their graves, the doomed living utter cries of horror, the worlds are shattered, the angels thunder in the clouds—that is the end of this musical drama."

These examples will be sufficient to show the peculiarity of mind to which I have referred. The early ideas of Berlioz seem to bear the same relation to those of ordinary men as a gas does to a solid or a liquid; the moment they are liberated they try to diffuse themselves through as much space as they can. In this connection it is interesting to note that from his earliest years he had a love for books of travel and for pondering dreamily over maps of the world; he sought the remoter conceptions that were not limited by any narrow boundary. One gets a curious sensation, after reading much of his prose, that the things of the world have lost their ordinary proportions and perspectives; the adjectives are so big and so numerous that one begins to take this inflated diction as the normal speech of men. Occasionally a truly superb effect of vastness, of distance, is produced, an effect we also get sometimes in Berlioz's music. It has always seemed to me, for example, that the opening of his song "Reviens, reviens," gave the most perfect suggestion of some one being recalled from a great distance; the whole atmosphere seems to be attenuated, rarefied almost away; the melancholy is the melancholy of a regret that sweeps the ocean to the horizon and fails to find what the eyes hunger for.