HECTOR BERLIOZ.
Reproduced from a Russian photograph, selected by von Bulow as being the best likeness of Berlioz in his later years.
Just a year later the conversion of the public to Berlioz music was accomplished by means of a grand festival at the Opéra in honor of the master, organized by his disciple Ernest Reyer. Even up to this time it was possible to hear Berlioz’s music only at the Popular Concerts, and then often in the midst of confusion and protestations. The announcement of this concert gave rise to many pleasantries, and people agreed, with nods and chuckles, that the best way to pay honor to such a man was to play music as unlike his as possible. However, the festival took place on the day appointed, with a program made up entirely of the master’s works, and some of the pieces, such as the Waltz of the Sylphs, and the Hungarian March, caused the liveliest surprise. They had come to laugh and they listened; they even applauded, and better than with the tips of their fingers. This was the signal for a reaction, and from that day the sudden change of opinion was only intensified as the musical public, who had hitherto tolerated only a few selections, familiarized themselves with the superb creations of this master and insisted on hearing successively all his complete works.
His wonderful La Damnation de Faust in particular, so little appreciated at first, finally had an amazing success and an irresistible attraction for the crowd, perhaps because the result was assisted by two or three concert performances. But there is nothing half-way about a French audience, it has no lukewarm sentiments, and it praises as immoderately as it condemns. Having once taken the stand, it accepted and applauded everything from Berlioz’s pen, and when it had exhausted mere bravos, it easily persuaded itself to erect a monument to his memory. First it was a question of a simple bust to be placed upon his tomb in Montmartre Cemetery, then it was proposed to erect a statue to him in his native city; but Paris did not wish to do less than Côte-Saint-André, and so it happened that Alfred Lénoir’s statue of the composer was erected in Vintimille square near the rue de Calais, the quarter where he spent a long period of his life and where he died. An exact duplicate of the statue was erected at Côte-Saint-André in 1890, and surely two statues are not too many to honor the great artist of whom Auber said with a little spice of wickedness,—“Yes, this Berlioz is certainly worth something, but what a pity that his education began so late.”
To-day Berlioz is at the topmost height of fame, and this renown he has achieved by one work. To the whole musical world he is the composer of La Damnation de Faust, and neither Romeo et Juliette, nor L’Enfance du Christ, nor the Requiem, each a masterpiece in its way, has obtained the widespread success of the first-named work. It is singular that a purely orchestral composition, La Symphony Fantastique, should be accorded a second rank in the general judgment. Strictly speaking, this symphony and La Damnation present, outside the music written by him for the stage, the quintessence of Berlioz’s genius. They are the two poles between which his affluent inspiration oscillates. In the former of these scores is to be found all the romantic exuberance of youth; the fury of a latent rebellion against discipline and yet wholly master of itself; a dazzling wealth of instrumentation; a poetic and delightful coloring. In the other, of which the style is more varied, burst forth a passion, an irony, a burning heat, a prodigious intuition of the effects of vast numbers, a fantastic raillery, a power of dramatic expression without equal. It is none the less true that genius radiates from many pages of his other works: the Pilgrim’s March in Harold: the Offertory and the Tuba Mirum in the Requiem; the Repose of the Holy Family in L’Enfance du Christ; the Night of the Ball, and the Love Scene from Roméo et Juliette; the nocturne-duet from Béatrice et Bénédict; the love-duet, the quintet and the septet in Les Troyens are all bright inspirations among creations of the highest worth, that met with great favor, although the works of which they are a part had not the power to win the masses as they were won by La Symphonie Fantastique and La Damnation de Faust. These last gratify the public taste (using the term in its broadest acceptation) because they are not merely concert music, but have a close affinity with the stage, in the dramatic stories they illustrate. I believe that the minute descriptive programme which Berlioz has attached to La Symphonie Fantastique has been largely instrumental in assuring the success of this work with a public that mentally follows the imaginary drama, step by step as the orchestra depicts the various episodes; now melodramatic, now rustic, now loving, sanguinary and demoniac. Such is still more the case with La Damnation de Faust. Berlioz’s work has certainly benefited by the attention drawn to Goethe’s poem by M. Gounod’s opera; the great mass of the public knew nothing of the original when La Damnation was first heard by them in 1846. Nowadays music lovers everywhere are equally well informed on this point; they understood, from the time that the opera was given, the meaning of what was recited to them by Berlioz’s singers, clad in black dress suits and white neckties; they filled in the gaps in his libretto from what the opera of Faust taught them; they compared number with number; in fact, by reason of placing side by side two works so widely unlike each other, they learned to appreciate the warm, passionate and magnificent power of Berlioz’s older composition. Thus little by little this product of genius has forced itself on general admiration as the model on which Gounod’s Faust was planned.
It is no exaggeration to proclaim La Damnation de Faust a work of genius, and it excites all the more admiration when we know that certain numbers, among others, the scene in which Faust is lulled to sleep by elfins, came from the brain of a composer only twenty-five years old, and appeared almost perfect in the Huit scènes de Faust which Berlioz published in 1829, not being able to have it performed, and which he dedicated to M. de Larochefoucauld. This fine scene, therefore, dates back to 1828, as does the beautiful song La Fête de Pâques and also the joyous rondo sung by the peasants. In fact, not only the grand choruses, but the shorter pieces, the songs of Le Rat and of La Puce; the ballad, Le Roi de Thule; the romance of Marguerite, joined arbitrarily to the soldiers’ chorus and La Sérenade du diable are all fragments of his youthful work that Berlioz retained in the score of his maturer period and had the skill to combine anew in several scenes of extraordinary poetic beauty and richness of effect. How inspired the pretty rustic scene into which he has inserted, judiciously or otherwise, his admirable Rakoczy March, written to gain the good will of the Hungarians; the superb monologue of the doctor, introducing the Easter chorus; the animated scene at the Auerbach tavern with its bizarre songs and the ironical fugue on the word Amen; the marvellous scene on the banks of the Elbe with the fine appeal to the demon; the delightful slumber chorus of the spirits and the exquisite ballet of the sylphs; the double chorus of students. Does it not seem that they were all conceived, composed and written down at a white heat and without a pause between them? How fascinating and impressive appears the really devilish serenade of Mephisto, the charming Ménuet des Follets after the ecstatic air of Faust, the archaic ballad of Marguerite, the extremely tender love-duet, and the grand final trio with its chorus of neighbors. The last part is, from beginning to end, absolutely above criticism. It opens with Marguerite’s sad lament interrupted by the chorus of students and leads up to the sublime invocation of nature; to the fantastic path of the abyss; to the lovely song of Seraphim after the furious suggestions of hell. What a splendid culmination!
Surely La Damnation de Faust is a masterpiece; but Roméo et Juliette is another and should have enjoyed as great a success. That it did not is perhaps owing to the fact that in Berlioz’s symphony, vocal music has only a small place, the instruments alone translating the sentiments of the characters, the two not being in juxtaposition as they are in many of the familiar operas of Romeo and Juliet by Gounod and others which ought to have led to an appreciation of Berlioz’s score. The seven movements that form this composition are all of marked worth and are appropriate to the strange plan of the work. In the first place, the prologue, imitated from Shakespeare, and of which M. Gounod, later, adopted Berlioz’s idea, presents a résumé of the work at once complete, grand and delightful, and comprises the fine verses that Berlioz, strangely enough, caused to be sung by a Muse in honor of Shakespeare and Poetry. The opening part includes three incomparable numbers: the poetic and piquantly agitated revery of Romeo wandering in the garden during the ball; the love scene between Juliet and Romeo, a masterpiece of orchestration; the Queen Mab movement, a model of fantastic airiness; also three numbers in the second part, the funeral of Juliet, with its penetrating sadness; the death of Romeo, in which Berlioz has given free rein to his passion for descriptive music, and the oath of reconciliation, preceded by a stirring recitative and the noble prayer of the monk. These are so many magnificent fragments, which, placed side by side according to the composer’s design, form a creation of a wholly superior order.
HECTOR BERLIOZ.
From an engraving by Auguste Hüssener.
After Faust and Romeo, comes the Requiem,—another triumph; a romantic composition of the first class, written with feverish enthusiasm by a master who rather sought to paint a striking picture to each line of the Requiem than to probe to the literal sense of the Latin text. The Kyrie is the least eccentric and the most expressive number. The Tuba Mirum, in particular, produces a tremendous effect with its four orchestras of brass; an idea that Félicien David and Verdi borrowed from this. Berlioz has given to the Lacrymosa a searching pathos. Perhaps the finest movement in the work to which Schumann rendered such ample justice, is the Offertorium. The requiem ends with a Sanctus for tenor solo, seraphic in sentiment, followed by a beautiful Agnus and a lovely, unfugued Amen. It is fitting to bring together, for comparison, this composition and the Te Deum written about 1850, of which the finest page is the hymn of the seraphim, Tibi omnes angeli, that rises to a magnificent crescendo and dies away at the close on a long and distant chord of the organ. The prayer for tenor solo, Te ergo quæsumus is equally perfect, and the final chorus is a majestic number to which Berlioz has attached a brilliant and thrilling triumphal march for the “presentation of flags.” It recalls by the vastness of its proportions and its orchestral massiveness, his Symphonie funèbre et triumphale, so much admired by Richard Wagner, and of which the peroration, entitled Apothéose, forced a flattering exclamation of praise from even the savage Habeneck.