The ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is by many considered Berlioz’s finest work. It is in two parts, the first including a number of choruses and recitatives narrating the course of the tragedy, and the second developing various pictures selected out of the action. The love scene is ‘pure’ music of the highest beauty, and the scherzo, based on the ‘Queen Mab’ speech, is one of Berlioz’s most typical inventions.
All these compositions antedate by a number of years the works of Liszt and Wagner, which make extended use of Berlioz’s means. Wagner describes at length how the idea of leit-motifs occurred to him during his composition of ‘The Flying Dutchman’ (completed in 1841), but he was certainly familiar with Berlioz’s works. Liszt was from the first a great admirer of Berlioz, and greatly helped to extend his reputation through his masterly piano arrangements of the Frenchman’s works. His development of the leit-motif in his symphonic poems is frankly an adaptation of the Berlioz idea.
Liszt’s dramatic symphonies are two—‘Dante’ and ‘Faust’—by which, doubtless, if he had his way, his name would chiefly be known among the nations. We have seen in an earlier chapter how deeply Liszt was impressed by the great paintings in Rome, and how in his youth he dreamed of some later Beethoven who would translate Dante into an immortal musical work. In the quiet of Weimar he set himself to accomplish the labor. The work is sub-titled ‘Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise,’ but it is in two movements, the Purgatory leading into, or perhaps only to, the gate of Heaven. The first movement opens with one of the finest of all Liszt’s themes, designed to express Dante’s
lines: ‘Through me the entrance to the city of horror; through me the entrance into eternal pain; through me the entrance to the dwelling place of the damned.’ And immediately another motive for the horns and trumpets to the famous words: ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’ The movement, with an excessive use of the diminished seventh chord, depicts the sufferings of the damned. But presently the composer comes to a different sort of anguish, which challenges all his powers as tone poet. It is the famous episode of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. It is introduced by another motive of great beauty, standing for the words: ‘There is no greater anguish than, during suffering, to think of happier times.’ In the Francesca episode Liszt lavishes all his best powers, and achieves some of his finest pages. The music now descends into the lower depths of the Inferno, and culminates in a thunderous restatement of the theme, ‘All hope abandon,’ by the horns, trumpets and trombones. The second movement, representing Purgatory, strikes a very different note, one of hope and aspiration, and culminates in the Latin Magnificat, sung by women’s voices to a modal tune, which Liszt, now once more a loyal Catholic, writes from the heart.
The ‘Faust’ symphony, written between 1854 and 1857, is hardly less magnificent in its plan and execution. It is sub-titled ‘three character-pictures,’ and its movements are assigned respectively to Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. Yet the last movement merges into a dramatic narration of the love story and of Faust’s philosophic aspirations, and reaches its climax in a men’s chorus intoning the famous final chorus from Goethe’s drama: ‘All things transitory are but a semblance.’ The Faust theme deserves quoting because of its chromatic character, which has become so typical of modern music:
