And it has the rhythmical vivacity and plenitude that characterizes the newest musical art. If there is one quality that unites in a place apart the Strawinskys and Ornsteins, the Blochs and Scriabines, it is the fearlessness and exuberance and savagery with which they pound out their rhythms. Something long buried in us seems to arise at the vibration of these fierce, bold, clattering, almost convulsive strokes, to seek to gesticulate and dance and leap. And Berlioz possessed this elemental feeling for rhythm. Schumann was convinced on hearing the "Symphonie Fantastique" that in Berlioz music was returning to its beginnings, to the state where rhythm was unconstrained and irregular, and that in a short while it would overthrow the laws which had bound it so long. So, too, it seems to us, despite all the rhythmical innovations of our time. The personality that could beat out exuberantly music as rhythmically various and terse and free must indeed have possessed a primitive naïveté and vitality and spontaneity of impulse. What manifestation of unbridled will in that freedom of expression! Berlioz must have been blood-brother to the savage, the elemental creature who out of the dark and hidden needs of life itself invents on his rude musical instrument a mighty rhythm. Or, he must have been like a powerful and excited steed, chafing his bit, mad to give his energy rein. His blood must forever have been craving the liberation of turgid and angular and irregular beats, must forever have been crowding his imagination with new and compelling combinations, impelling him to the movements of leaping and marching. For he seems to have found in profusion the accents that quicken and lift and lance, found them in all varieties, from the brisk and delicate steps of the ballets in "La Damnation de Faust" to the large, far-flung momentum that drives the choruses of the "Requiem" mountain high; from the mad and riotous finales of the "Harold" symphony and the "Symphonie Fantastique" to the red, turbulent and canaille march rhythms, true music of insurgent masses, clangorous with echoes of tocsins and barricades and revolutions.
But it is in his treatment of his instrument that Berlioz seems most closely akin to the newest musicians. For he was the first to permit the orchestra to dictate music to him. There had, no doubt, existed skilful and sensitive orchestrators before him, men who were deeply aware of the nature of their tools, men who, like Mozart, could scarcely repress their tears at the sound of a favorite instrument, and wrote marvelously for flutes and horns and oboes and all the components of their bands. But matched with his, their knowledge of the instrument was patently relative. For, with them, music had on the whole a general timbre. Phrases which they assigned, say, to violins or flutes can be assigned to other instruments without doing the composition utter damage. But in the works of Berlioz music and instruments are inseparable. One cannot at all rearrange his orchestration. Though the phrases that he has written for bassoon or clarinet might imaginably be executed by other instruments, the music would perish utterly in the substitution. What instrument but the viola could appreciate the famous "Harold" theme? For just as in a painting of Cézanne's the form is inseparable from the color, is, indeed, one with it, so, too, in the works of Berlioz and the moderns the form is part of the sensuous quality of the band. When Rimsky-Korsakoff uttered the pronouncement that a composition for orchestra could not exist before the orchestration was completed, he was only phrasing a rule upon which Berlioz had acted all his life. For Berlioz set out to learn the language of the orchestra. Not only did he call for new instruments, instruments that have eventually become integral portions of the modern bands, but he devoted himself to a study of the actual natures and ranges and qualities of the old, and wrote the celebrated treatise that has become the textbook of the science of instrumentation. The thinness of much of his work, the feebleness of the overture to "Benvenuto Cellini," for instance, results from his inexperience in the new tongue. But he had not to practise long. It was not long before he became the teacher of his very contemporaries. Wagner owes as much to Berlioz's instrumentation as he owes to Chopin's harmony.
But for the new men, he is more than teacher. For them he is like the discoverer of a new continent. Through him they have come to find a new fashion of apprehending the world. Out of the paint-box that he opened, they have drawn the colors that make us see anew in their music the face of the earth. The tone-poems of Debussy and the ballets of Ravel and Strawinsky, the scintillating orchestral compositions of Strauss and Rimsky and Bloch, could scarcely have come to be had not Berlioz called the attention of the world to the instruments in which the colors and timbres in which it is steeped, lie dormant.
And so the large and powerful and contained being that, after all, was Berlioz has come to appreciation. For behind the fiery, the volcanic Berlioz, behind the Byronic and fantastical composer, there was always another, greater man. The history of the art of Berlioz is the history of the gradual incarnation of that calm and majestic being, the gradual triumph of that grander personality over the other, up to the final unclosing and real presence in "Roméo" and the "Mass for the Dead." The wild romanticist, the lover of the strange and the lurid and the grotesque who created the "Symphonic Fantastique," never, perhaps, became entirely abeyant. And some of the salt and flavor of Berlioz's greater, more characteristic works, the tiny musical particles, for instance, that compose the "Queen Mab" scherzo in "Roméo," or the bizarre combination of flutes and trombones in the "Requiem," macabre as the Orcagna frescoes in Pisa, are due his fantastical imaginings. But, gradually, the deeper Berlioz came to predominate. That deeper spirit was a being that rose out of a vast and lovely cavern of the human soul, and was clothed in stately and in shining robes. It was a spirit that could not readily build itself out into the world, so large and simple it was, and had to wait long before it could find a worthy portal. It managed only to express itself partially, fragmentarily, in various transformations, till, by change, it found in the idea of the Mass for the Dead its fitting opportunity. Still, it was never entirely absent from the art of Berlioz, and in the great clear sense of it gained in the "Requiem" we can perceive its various and ever-present substantiations, from the very beginning of his career.
It is in the overture to "King Lear" already, in that noble and gracious introduction. From the very beginning, Berlioz revealed himself a proud and aristocratic spirit. Even in his most helpless moments, he is always noble. He shows himself possessed of a hatred for all that is unjust and ungirt and vulgar. There is always a largeness and gravity and chastity in his gesture. The coldness is most often simply the apparent coldness of restraint; the baldness, the laconism of a spirit that abhorred loose, ungainly manners of speech. Even the frenetic and orgiastic finales of the "Harold" and "Fantastic" symphonies are tempered by an athletic steeliness and irony, are pervaded, after all, by the good dry light of the intellect. The greater portion of the "Harold" is obviously, in its coolness and neatness and lightness, the work of one who was unwilling to dishevel himself in the cause of expression, who outlined his sensations reticently rather than effusively, and stood always a little apart. The "Corsair" overture has not the wild, rich balladry of that of the "Flying Dutchman," perhaps. But it is full of the clear and quivering light of the Mediterranean. It is, in the words of Hans von Bülow, "as terse as the report of a pistol." And it flies swiftly before a wind its own. The mob-scenes in "Benvenuto Cellini" are bright and brisk and sparkling, and compare not unfavorably with certain passages in "Petrouchka." And, certainly, "Roméo" manifests unforgettably the fineness and nobility of Berlioz's temper. "The music he writes for his love scenes," some one has remarked, "is the best test of a musician's character." For, in truth, no type of musical expression gives so ample an opportunity to all that is latently vulgar in him to produce itself. And one has but to compare the "Garden Scene" of "Roméo" with two other pieces of music related to it in style, the second act of "Tristan" and the "Romeo" of Tchaikowsky, to perceive in how gracious a light Berlioz's music reveals him. Wagner's powerful music hangs over the garden of his lovers like an oppressive and sultry night. Foliage and streams and the very moonlight pulsate with the fever of the blood. But there is no tenderness, no youth, no delicacy, no grace in Wagner's love-passages. Tchaikowsky's, too, is predominantly lurid and sensual. And while Wagner's at least is full of animal richness, Tchaikowsky's is morbid and hysterical and perverse, sets us amid the couches and draperies and pink lampshades instead of out under the night-time sky. Berlioz's, however, is full of a still and fragrant poesy. His is the music of Shakespeare's lovers indeed. It is like the opening of hearts dumb with the excess of joy. It has all the high romance, all the ecstasy of the unspoiled spirit. For Berlioz seems to have possessed always his candor and his youth. Through three hundred years men have turned toward Shakespeare's play, with its Italian night and its balcony above the fruit-tree tops, in wonder at its youthful loveliness, its delicate picture of first love. In Berlioz's music, at last, it found a worthy rival. For the musician, too, had within him some of the graciousness and highness and sweetness of spirit the poet manifested so sovereignly.
But it is chiefly in the "Requiem" that Berlioz revealed himself in all the grandeur and might of his being. For in it all the aristocratic coolness and terseness of "La Damnation de Faust" and of "Harold en Italie," all the fresco-like calm of "Les Troyens à Carthage," find their freest, richest expression. "Were I to be threatened with the destruction of all that I have ever composed," wrote Berlioz on the eve of his death, "it would be for that work that I would beg life." And he was correct in the estimation of its value. It is indeed one of the great edifices of tone. For the course of events which demanded of Berlioz the work had supplied him with a function commensurate with his powers, and permitted him to register himself immortally. He was called by his country to write a mass for a commemoration service in the church of the Invalides. That gold-domed building, consecrated to the memory of the host of the fallen, to the countless soldiers slain in the wars of the monarchy and the republic and the empire, and soon to become the tomb of Napoleon, had need of its officiant. And so the genius of Berlioz arose and came. The "Requiem" is the speech of a great and classic soul, molded by the calm light and fruitful soil of the Mediterranean. For all its "Babylonian and Ninevitish" bulk, it is full of the Latin calm, the Latin repose, the Latin resignation. The simple tone, quiet for all its energy, the golden sweetness of the "Sanctus," the naked acceptance of all the facts of death, are the language of one who had within him an attitude at once primitive and grand, an attitude that we have almost come to ignore. Listening to the Mass, we find ourselves feeling as though some vates of a Mediterranean folk were come in rapt and lofty mood to offer sacrifice, to pacify the living, to celebrate with fitting rites the unnumbered multitudes of the heroic dead. There are some compositions that seem to find the common ground of all men throughout the ages. And to the company of such works of art, the grand Mass for the Dead of Hector Berlioz belongs.
Still, the commission to write the "Requiem" was but a momentary welcoming extended to Berlioz. The age in which he lived was unprepared for his art. It found itself better prepared for Wagner. For Wagner's was nearer the older music, summed it up, in fact. So Berlioz had to remain uncomprehended and unhoused. And when there finally came a time for the music of Wagner to retreat, and another to take its place, Berlioz was still half-buried under the misunderstanding of his time. And yet, with the Kassandra of Eulenberg, Berlioz could have said at the moment when it seemed as though eternal night were about to obscure him forever:
"Einst treibt der Frühling uns in neuer Blüthe
Empor ans Licht; Leben, wir scheiden nicht,
Denn ewig bleibet, was in uns erglühte