Musical Portraits Part 2

You were indeed profusely endowed, showered with musical gifts as some cradled prince might be showered with presents and honors. Everything in your personality was grand, seigneurial, immense in scale. You were born musical King of Cyprus and Jerusalem and Armenia, t.i.tular sovereign of vast, unclaimed realms. Few composers have been more inventive. No composer has ever scattered abroad ideas with more liberal hand.

Compositions like the B-minor piano-sonata, the tone-poem "Mazeppa," the "Dante" symphony, whatever their artistic value, fairly teem with original themes of a high order, are like treasure houses in which gold ornaments lie negligently strewn in piles. Indeed, your inventive power supplied not only your own compositions with material, but those of your son-in-law, Richard Wagner, as well. As James Huneker once so brightly put it, "Wagner was indebted to you for much besides money, sympathy, and a wife." For Siegmund and Sieglinde existed a long while in your "Dante" symphony before Wagner transferred them to "Die Walkure"; Parsifal and Kundry a long while in your piano-sonata before he introduced them into his "Buhnenweihfestspiel."

You were equipped for piano-composition as was no other of your time.

For you the instrument was a newer, stranger, more virgin thing than it was for either Schumann or Chopin. You knew even better than they how to listen for its proper voice. You were more deeply aware than they of its proper color and quality. You seem to have come to it absolutely without preconceived ideas. Your B-minor sonata, however unsatisfactory its actual quality, remains one of the magistral works of the sort. For few works better exhibit the various ranges of the instrument, better contrast different volumes of piano-sound. The sonata actually lies on different planes, proceeds from various directions, delimits a solid form, makes even Beethoven's seem flat and two-dimensional by contrast.

Here, almost for the first time, is a sonata that is distinctly music _of_ the pianoforte. And the modern achievements in pianoforte composition do not by any means lessen the wonder of your comprehension of the instrument's dynamics. The new men, Scriabine and the composers of the modern French school, may have penetrated more deeply than it was in your power to do, may have achieved where you failed.

Nevertheless, they could not have progressed had it not been for your way-finding. They are immeasurably indebted to you.

Not even Wagner had an influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the _terra incognita_ of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, h.o.m.ophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form of every piece makes you the link between cla.s.sic and modern musical art.

The symphonic poem, whether or not it originates in the overtures of Beethoven, is mainly your handiwork, since although you yourself were not sufficiently free of the cla.s.sic formulas to create a symphonic form entirely programmatic, as Strauss has subsequently done, you nevertheless gave him the hint whereby he has profited most. The impressionists, too, seem to stem from you. The little piece called "Les jeux d'eau de La Villa d'Este" seems not a little to antic.i.p.ate their style. And although you were not responsible for the music of the nationalistic Russian school, the robust, colorful barbarian in you nevertheless made you welcome and encourage their work. It made you write to Borodin and Moussorgsky those cordial letters which pleased them so much. For at that time they were but obscure workmen, while you were the very prince of musicians.

Indeed, nothing is more princely, nothing better reveals the amplitude, the generosity of your spirit, than your relations with your fellow craftsmen. Artists are oftentimes so petty in their conduct toward each other that it is indeed refres.h.i.+ng to read with what infallible kindness you treated so many composers less fortunately situated than yourself.

And not only Wagner and Cesar Franck benefited by your good deeds. Many obscurer and younger men, poor Edward MacDowell, for instance, knew what it was to receive cordial and commendatory letters from you, to be a.s.sisted by you in their careers, to have their compositions brought to performance by the best German orchestras through your aid. And you had no conceit in you, smilingly referred to your symphonic poems as "Gartenmusik," and replied to Wagner, when he informed you that he had stolen such and such a theme from you, "Thank goodness, now it will at least be heard!" Had you, O Liszt, expressed the n.o.bility of your nature as purely in your composition as you expressed it in your social relations, we could have complained of no mountainous rubble, no squalor marring the perfect splendor of your figure.

But, unhappily, the veritable grandeur of your endowment never begot itself a body of work really symbolic of itself. For if your music, as a whole, has any grandeur, it is the hollow grandeur of inflation, of ostentation, of externality. Your music is almost entirely a monstrous _decor de theatre_. It is forever seeking to establish tragical and satanic and pa.s.sional atmospheres, to suggest immense and regal and terrific things, to gain tremendous effects. It is full of loud, grandiloquent p.r.o.nouncements, of whirlwinds, thunderstorms, coronations on the Capitoline, ideals, lamentations, cavalcades across half of Asia, draperies, ma.s.sacres, frescoes, facades, magnificats, lurid sunsets, scimitars, miracles, triumphs of the cross, retreats from the world. It is full of all the romantic properties. Like vast pieces of stage scenery the various pa.s.sages and movements are towed before our eyes, and we are bidden to feast our eyes on representations of t.i.tanic rocks and lowering skies and holy hermits' dwellings that remind us dangerously of the wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbread fairs. The atmosphere of the compositions is so invariably sensational, the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the truly impressive material, the quant.i.ties of original ideas, lose all substantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountains of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, these loud and prancing concertos of circus-music. There is something almost insulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these pretentious facades, these vast, pompous frescoes by Kaulbach, these Byronic instrumental soliloquies, these hollow, empty flourishes of the bra.s.s, these foolishly satanic chromatics, these inevitable triumphs of the cross and the Gregorian modes.

No doubt, much of your fustian and rhodomontade, your diabolic att.i.tudes, your grandiose battles between the hosts of evil and the light of the Tree, your interminable fanfares, was due the age in which you grew. The externality, the pompousness of intention, the theatrical postures, was part of the romantic const.i.tution. The desire to achieve sensational effects, the tendency to externalize, to a.s.sume theatrical postures and intend pompously, was inborn in every single one of the men among whom you pa.s.sed your youth. For they had suddenly, painfully become aware that nature was supremely indifferent to their individual fates and sorrows. So wounded were they in their _amour-propre_ that they sought to restore their diminished sense of self-worth by exaggerating the importance and intensity of their sufferings and seeking to convince themselves of their satanic sins and dreadful dooms.

Manfred, posing darkly on an Alpine crag and summoning

"Nature to her feud With bile & buskin att.i.tude,"

was the type of you all. You had to ward off consciousness of your own insignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings, lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums, subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring under frightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.

But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Delacroix, for instance, attractive, even, because of the virtue of his painting, and forgive that of a Berlioz and a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to love yours. For in you the disease was aggravated by the presence of another powerful incentive to strut and posture and externalize and inflate your art. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man whose entire being was pointed to achieve an effect. You were the man whose life is lived on the concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, who finds his highest good in the instantaneous effect achieved by his performance. From childhood you were the idolized piano-virtuoso. All your days you were smothered in the adulation showered upon you in very tangible form by the great ladies of every capital of Europe. And a virtuoso you remained all your existence. You never developed out of that early situation into something more salutary to the artist. On the contrary, you came to require the atmosphere of the performance, the exhibition, about you continually, to find the rose leaves and the clouds of perfume absolutely necessary. Most of your composition seems but the effort to perpetuate about you the admiration and the adulation, the glowing eyes and half-parted lips and heaving bosoms. Everything in your piano-music is keyed for that effect. The shameless sentimentalities, the voluptuous lingerings over sweet chords and incisive notes, the ostentatious recitatives, the moist, sensual climaxes, the t.i.tillating figuration, the over-draperies, were called into existence for the immediate, the overwhelming effect at first hearing. Everything is broadened and peppered and directed to obtaining you the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy and theatrical, your music is what Nietzsche so bitterly called it, "Die Schule der Gelaufichkeit--nach Frauen."

So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered, your ideas shallowly set, your science misused. For while fate showered you magnificently with gifts, it seems to have at the same time sought to negate its liberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy, by decreeing that you should have enormous powers and yet abuse them. It prevented you from often being completely genuine, completely incandescent, completely fine. It refused you for the greater part the true adamantine hardness of the artist, the inviolability of soul, the sense of style.

It made you, the prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematic material, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase your ideas, and give them their full value. Wagner could have said of you, had he so wished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whom he borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" One must indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions, the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry, music, which you cast from you so carelessly. As for yourself, you are too much the "virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps the most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known to us. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music.

We always seem to see you sitting on the concert-platform before us, immersed in the expression of your pa.s.sion, your disgust of pa.s.sion, your renunciation of pa.s.sion. But the absorption is not quite as complete as it would appear to be. During the entire performance, you have been secretly keeping one wicked little eye trained on the ladies of the audience.

Sometimes you play the religious. Perhaps there truly was in you a vein of devotion and faith. The fact that you took Holy Orders to escape marrying the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, who pursued you those many years and doubtlessly bored you with her theological writings, does not entirely disprove its existence. Indeed, your "Dante" symphony, with its h.e.l.l full of impenitent s.e.xual offenders, its Purgatory full of those who repent them of their excesses, its Paradise represented by a hymn to the Virgin, suggests what manner of role, and how real a one, religion might have played in your luxurious existence. But, for the most part, the religiosity of your music recalls overmuch the fas.h.i.+onable confessor's. You bring consolation, doubtlessly. But you bring it by choice into the boudoir. You speak sadly of the cruel winds of l.u.s.t. You dwell on the example of the pious St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

You spread your hands over fair penitents, making a series of the most beautiful gestures. You whisper honeyed forgiveness for pa.s.sional sins.

You always excite tears and grat.i.tude. But, in the end, your "Consolation" turns out only another "Liebestraum."

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 pa.s.sionate laments. In a sort of ecstasy you celebrate Hungaria. Then, smiling brilliantly, you pa.s.s the hat.

Once, only, your eye did not wander liquidly to the gallery. Once, only, your workmans.h.i.+p was not marred by schemes for t.i.tillating 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 impa.s.sioned, 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 Ta.s.so 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 Abbe 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 Weingartner, 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 a.s.sume 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 cla.s.sic 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 ma.s.ses 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 a.s.syria. 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 "Pelleas et Melisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fas.h.i.+on, 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'energie c'est le grace supreme." 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.

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 navete 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 d.a.m.nation 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 ma.s.ses, 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 a.s.signed, say, to violins or flutes can be a.s.signed 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 ba.s.soon or clarinet might imaginably be executed by other instruments, the music would perish utterly in the subst.i.tution. What instrument but the viola could appreciate the famous "Harold" theme? For just as in a painting of Cezanne'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 p.r.o.nouncement 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 "Romeo" and the "Ma.s.s 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 "Romeo," 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 Ma.s.s 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 n.o.ble and gracious introduction. From the very beginning, Berlioz revealed himself a proud and aristocratic spirit. Even in his most helpless moments, he is always n.o.ble. He shows himself possessed of a hatred for all that is unjust and ungirt and vulgar. There is always a largeness and gravity and chast.i.ty 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 Bulow, "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 pa.s.sages in "Petrouchka." And, certainly, "Romeo" manifests unforgettably the fineness and n.o.bility 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 "Romeo"

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-pa.s.sages. 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 d.a.m.nation de Faust" and of "Harold en Italie," all the fresco-like calm of "Les Troyens a 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 ma.s.s 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 cla.s.sic 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 att.i.tude at once primitive and grand, an att.i.tude that we have almost come to ignore. Listening to the Ma.s.s, 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 mult.i.tudes 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 Ma.s.s 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 Ka.s.sandra 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 Fruhling uns in neuer Bluthe Empor ans Licht; Leben, wir scheiden nicht, Denn ewig bleibet, was in uns ergluhte Und drangt sich ewig wieder auf zum Licht!"

For the likeness so many of the new men bear him has provided us with a wonderful instance of the eternal recurrence of things.

Franck

Belgian of Liege by birth, and Parisian only by adoption, Cesar Franck nevertheless precipitated modern French music. The group of musicians that,--at the moment when the great line of composers that has descended in Germany since the days of Bach dwindled in Strauss and Mahler and Reger,--revived the high tradition of French music, created a fresh and original musical art, and at present, by virtue of the influence it exercises on the new talents of other nations, has come well-nigh to dominate the international musical situation, could scarcely have attained existence had it not been for him. He a.s.sured the artistic success not only of the men like Magnard and d'Indy and Dukas, whose art shows obvious signs of his influence. Composers like Debussy and Ravel, who appear to have arrived at maturity independently of him, have nevertheless benefited immeasurably by his work. It is possible that had he not emigrated from Liege and labored in the heart of France, they would not have achieved any of their fullness of expression. For what Berlioz was perhaps too premature and too eccentric and radical to bring about,--the dissipation of the torpor that had weighed upon the musical sense of his countrymen for a century, the reawakening of the peculiarly French impulse to make music, not alone in single and solitary individuals, but in a large and representative group, the revival of a truly musical life in France,--this man, by virtue of the peculiarities of his art, and particularly by virtue of his timeliness, succeeded in effecting.

For Cesar Franck overcame a false musical culture in the land of his adoption by showing it, at the moment it was prepared to perceive it, the face of a true. The French are not an outstandingly musical race.

Music plays a comparatively insignificant role in their civilization.