This absurd stuttering Gossec designed to picture the terror inspired by the coming of the Judge at the last trumpet.
The orchestra in the Mass.
Beethoven and Berlioz.
The development of instrumentation placed a factor in the hands of these writers which they were not slow to utilize, especially in writing music for the Dies iræ, and how effectively Mozart used the orchestra in his Requiem it is not necessary to state. It is a safe assumption that Beethoven's Mass in D was largely instrumental in inspiring Berlioz to set the Requiem as he did. With Beethoven the dramatic idea is the controlling one, and so it is with Berlioz. Beethoven, while showing a reverence for the formulas of the Church, and respecting the tradition which gave the Kyrie a triple division and made fugue movements out of the phrases "Cum sancto spiritu in gloria Dei patris—Amen," "Et vitam venturi," and "Osanna in excelsis," nevertheless gave his composition a scope which placed it beyond the apparatus of the Church, and filled it with a spirit that spurns the limitations of any creed of less breadth and universality than the grand Theism which affectionate communion with nature had taught him.
Berlioz's Requiem.
Dramatic effects in Haydn's masses.
Berlioz's orchestra.
Berlioz, less religious, less reverential, but equally fired by the solemnity and majesty of the matter given into his hands, wrote a work in which he placed his highest conception of the awfulness of the Last Judgment and the emotions which are awakened by its contemplation. In respect of the instrumentation he showed a far greater audacity than Beethoven displayed even in the much-mooted trumpets and drums of the Agnus Dei, where he introduces the sounds of war to heighten the intensity of the prayer for peace, "Dona nobis pacem." This is talked about in the books as a bold innovation. It seems to have escaped notice that the idea had occurred to Haydn twenty-four years before and been realized by him. In 1796 Haydn wrote a mass, "In Tempore Belli," the French army being at the time in Steyermark. He set the words, "Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi," to an accompaniment of drums, "as if the enemy were already heard coming in the distance." He went farther than this in a Mass in D minor, when he accompanied the Benedictus with fanfares of trumpets. But all such timid ventures in the use of instruments in the mass sink into utter insignificance when compared with Berlioz's apparatus in the Tuba mirum of his Requiem, which supplements the ordinary symphonic orchestra, some of its instruments already doubled, with four brass bands of eight or ten instruments each, sixteen extra drums, and a tam-tam.
