“Berlioz’s early influences were as much literary as musical. His reading was mainly romantic; his musical gods were Beethoven, Weber and Gluck, whose orchestral writings influenced him most. He knew little of Beethoven’s piano writings and did not like Bach. Into the intellectual world of the Beethoven symphony and the operas of Gluck and Weber, he breathed the newer, more nervous life of the French Romanticists. Color and sensation became as important as form and the pure idea. These influences and his literary instincts led him to graft the programme form on the older symphony. All his music aims at something concrete. Instead of the abstract world of the classical symphonists he gives us definite emotions, or paints definite scenes. His own words: ‘I have taken up music where Beethoven left it’ indicate his position. He is the real beginner of that interpenetration of music and the poetic idea which has transformed modern art.”[74]
Berlioz’s temperament was like a volcano bursting continually into fire and flame and his mind took delight in everything of enormous magnitude. He loved to think of the Pyramids of Egypt, of huge lonely mountains, of great seas, the bursting of thunderbolts and the howl of tempests. Everything with him appeared in colossal proportions; and, consequently, much of his music seemed to the people of his time, even more than to us to-day, to have been written for the ears of giants and Titans and not for men and women of ordinary build.
Heine appreciated this phase of the extravagant Berlioz. “A colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle,” he wrote of him, “such as once existed in the primæval world. Yes, the music of Berlioz, in general seems to me 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 are shown in the pictures of the English painter Martin.”
This is all true, but it represents only one side of Berlioz.
Berlioz could be exquisite and dainty as well as colossal and terrific, as we hear in the Queen Mab Scherzo from the Roméo et Juliette Symphony, and the Dance of the Sylphs from the Damnation of Faust.
Berlioz is called the “Father of Modern Orchestration.” To appreciate the magnitude of his work, we must forget all our modern music for a moment and remember what the Orchestra was like when Berlioz, a country boy of eighteen, arrived in Paris in 1821.
BERLIOZ
By Fischer
Berlioz “is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of music. In his earliest years, as in his latest, Berlioz was himself, a solitary figure, owing practically nothing to other people’s music, an artist we may say, without ancestry and without posterity. Mozart builds upon Haydn and influences Beethoven; Beethoven imitates Mozart and in turn influences the practice of all later symphonists; Wagner learns from Weber and gives birth to a host of imitators. But with Berlioz—and it is a point to be insisted on—there is no one whose speech he tried to copy in his early years and there is no one since who speaks with his voice. How many things in the early Beethoven were made in the factory of Mozart! How many times does the early Wagner speak with the voice of Weber! But who can turn over the scores of Berlioz’s early works and find a single phrase that can be fathered upon any previous, or contemporary, writer? There was never any one, before his time or since, who thought and wrote just like him; his musical style especially is absolutely his own. Now and then in L’Enfance du Christ he suggests Gluck—not in the turn of his phrases but in the general atmosphere of an aria; but apart from this it is the rarest thing for him to remind us of any other composer. His melody, his harmony, his rhythm, are absolutely his own.”[75]