No doubt, you loved your native land. But your patriotism recalls dangerously the restaurant Magyar, the fiddler in the frogged coat. You draw from your violin passionate laments. In a sort of ecstasy you celebrate Hungaria. Then, smiling brilliantly, you pass the hat.
Once, only, your eye did not wander liquidly to the gallery. Once, only, your workmanship was not marred by schemes for titillating effects, for sensational contrasts, for grandiose and bombastic expression. Once, only, you were completely the artist, impregnating your work with a fine glow of life, making it deeply dignified and impassioned, sincere and firm, profoundly moving. For you, too, there was the cardinal exception. For you there was the "Faust Symphony." The work is romantic music, the music of the Byronic school par excellence. Here, too, is the brooding and revolt, the satanic cynicism, the expert's language. But here the miracle has taken place, and your music, generally so loose and shallow and theatrical, has the point, the intensity, the significance that it seems everywhere else to lack. Here, for once, is a work of yours that moves by its own initiative, that has an independent and marvelous life, that is brilliant and yet substantial. Here you have materialized yourself. We believe in your Faust as we believe neither in your Tasso nor in your Mazeppa nor in your Orpheus. For he utters your own romantic brooding in touching and impressive terms. In the theme that conjures up before us "Faust in ritterlicher Hofkleidung des Mittelalters," you have expressed your own seigneurial pride and daintiness. Goethe must have tapped with his tragedy, his characters, some vein long choked in you. In each of the three movements, the Faust, the Marguerite and the Mephisto, you make your best music. There is real drama in the first. There is a warm, fragrant hush in the second. Perhaps Gretchen plucks her daisy a little too thoroughly. But there is a rare sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling in her music. It is all in pastels. There is something very youthful and warm in it that perhaps no other composition of yours displays, as though in composing it you had recaptured pristine emotions long since spoiled.
But it is the third movement, the Allegro ironico, that opened your sluices and produced your genius. For in the conception of Mephisto you found in Goethe, you found your own spiritual equation. You, too, were victim of a disillusioned intellect that played havoc with all you found pure and lovely and poured its sulphuric mockery over all your aspiration. For all your mariolatry, you were full of "der Geist der stets verneint." And so you were able to create a musical Mephisto that will outlive your other work, sonata and all, and express you to other times. For here, all that one senses dimly behind your sugared and pretentious compositions speaks out frankly. Listening to this mighty scherzo, we know the cynicism that corroded your spirit. We hear it surge and fill the sky. We hear it pour its mocking laughter over grief and longing and pride, over purity and tenderness in those outrageous orchestral arabesques that descend on the themes of the "Faust" and "Marguerite" movements, and whip them into grinning distortions. We hear it deny and stamp and curse, topple the whole world over in ribald scorn. The concluding chorus may seek to call in another emotion. You may turn with all apparent fervor and pray "das Ewig-Weibliche" to save you. The other expression remains the telling one. It is one of the supreme pieces of musical irony. It ranks with "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Petrouchka."
It is also the saddest of your works. For it makes us know, once for all, how infinitely much greater a musician you might have been, O miserable and magnificent Abbé Liszt!
Berlioz
The course of time, that has made so many musicians recede from us and dwindle, has brought Berlioz the closer to us and shown him great. The age in which he lived, the decades that followed his death, found him unsubstantial enough. They recognized in him only the projector of gigantic edifices, not the builder. His music seemed scaffolding only. Though a generation of musicians learned from him, came to listen to the proper voices of the instruments of the orchestra because of him, though music became increasingly pictural, ironic, concrete because he had labored, his own work still appeared ugly with unrealized intentions. If he obtained at all as an artist, it was because of his frenetic romanticism, his bizarreness, his Byronic postures, traits that were after all minor and secondary enough in him. For those were the only of his characteristics that his hour could understand. All others it ignored. And so Berlioz remained for half a century simply the composer of the extravagant "Symphonic Fantastique" and the brilliant "Harold in Italy," and, for the rest, a composer of brittle and arid works, barren of authentic ideas, "a better litterateur than musician." However, with the departure of the world from out the romantic house, Berlioz has rapidly recovered. Music of his that before seemed ugly has gradually come to have force and significance. Music of his that seemed thin and gray has suddenly become satisfactory and red. Composers as eminent as Richard Strauss, conductors as conservative as Weingärtner, critics as sensitive as Romain Rolland have come to perceive his vast strength and importance, to express themselves concerning him in no doubtful language. It is as though the world had had to move to behold Berlioz, and that only in a day germane to him and among the men his kin could he assume the stature rightfully his, and live.
For we exist to-day in a time of barbarian inroads. We are beholding the old European continent of music swarmed over by Asiatic hordes, Scyths and Mongols and Medes and Persians, all the savage musical tribes. Once more the old arbitrary barrier between the continents is disappearing, and the classic traits of the West are being mingled with those of the subtle, sensuous, spiritual East. It is as if the art of music, with its new scales, its new harmonies, its new coloring, its new rhythmical life, were being revolutionized, as if it were returning to its beginnings. It is as if some of the original impulse to make music were reawakening. And so, through this confusion, Berlioz has suddenly flamed with significance. For he himself was the rankest of barbarians. A work like the "Requiem" has no antecedents. It conforms to no accepted canon, seems to obey no logic other than that of the rude and powerful mind that cast it forth. For the man who could write music so crude, so sheerly strong, so hurtling, music innocent of past or tradition, the world must indeed have been in the first day of its creation. For such a one forms must indeed have had their pristine and undulled edge and undiminished bulk, must have insisted themselves sharply and compellingly. The music has all the uncouthness of a direct and unquestioning response to such a vision. Little wonder that it was unacceptable to a silver and romantic epoch. The romanticists had aspired to paint vast canvases, too. But the vastness of their canvases had remained a thing of intention, a thing of large and pretentious decoration. Berlioz's music was both too rude and too stupendous for their tastes. And, in truth, to us as well, who have felt the great cubical masses of the moderns and have heard the barbarian tread, the sense of beauty that demanded the giant blocks of the "Requiem" music seems still a little a strange and monstrous thing. It seems indeed an atavism, a return to modes of feeling that created the monuments of other ages, of barbarous and forgotten times. Well did Berlioz term his work "Babylonian and Ninevitish"! Certainly it is like nothing so much as the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer, vast tombs and ramparts and terraces of Khorsabad and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun of Assyria. Berlioz must have harbored some elemental demand for form inherent in the human mind but buried and forgotten until it woke to life in him again. For there is a truly primitive and savage power in the imagination that could heap such piles of music, revel in the shattering fury of trumpets, upbuild choragic pyramids. Here, before Strawinsky and Ornstein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbarous and radical and revolutionary, a music beside which so much of modern music dwindles.
It has, primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of "Pelléas et Mélisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second through a Gothic severity, the third through a machine-like regularity, to give their work a new boldness, a new power and incisiveness of design. Something of the same sharpness and sheerness was attained by Berlioz, if not precisely by their means, at least to a degree no less remarkable than theirs. He attained it through the nakedness of his melodic line. The music of the "Requiem" is almost entirely a singularly powerful and characteristic line. It is practically unsupported. Many persons pretend that Berlioz wanted a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint. Certainly his feeling for harmony was a very rudimentary one, in nowise refined beyond that of his predecessors, very simple when compared to that of his contemporaries, Chopin and Schumann. And his attempts at creating counterpoint, judged from the first movement of "Harold in Italy," are clumsy enough. But it is questionable whether this ignorance did not stand him in good stead rather than in bad; and whether, in the end, he did not make himself fairly independent of both these musical elements. For the "Requiem" attains a new sort of musical grandeur from its sharp, heavy, rectangular, rhythmically powerful melodic line. It voices through it a bold, naked, immense language. With Baudelaire, Berlioz could have said, "L'énergie c'est le grâce suprême." For the beauty of this his masterpiece lies in just the delineating power, the characteristic of this crude, vigorous, unadorned melody. Doubtless to those still baffled by its nudity, his music appears thin. But if it is at all thin, its thinness is that of the steel cable.