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He was alone in the age of Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, and Franck; alone, yet containing a whole world in himself, of which his enemies, his friends, his admirers, and he himself, were not quite conscious; alone, and tortured by his loneliness. Alone the word is repeated by the music of his youth and his old age, by the Symphonie fantastique and Les Troyens.
There were the numerous tales, tales as perfect as the world has ever seen; "La Morte Amoureuse," "Jettatura," "Une Nuit de Cléopâtre," etc., and then the very diamonds of the crown, "Les Emaux et Camées," "La Symphonie en Blanc Majeure," in which the adjective blanc and blanche is repeated with miraculous felicity in each stanza. And then Contralto,
Four years after this he bestowed the sum of twenty thousand francs on Berlioz, who was then in pressing need, delicately disguising the donation as a testimonial of his admiration for the "Symphonie Fantastique."
I am asked to write an Overture and am going to take as subject Shakespeare's Tempest; it will be quite a new style of thing. My great concert, with the Symphonie Fantastique, will take place November 14, but I must have a theatrical success; Camille's parents insist on that, as a condition of our marriage. I hope I shall succeed."
The "Harold" music was now finished and Berlioz advertised both this and the Symphonie Fantastique for a concert at the Conservatoire, December 16, 1838. Paganini was present, and declared he had never been so moved by music before. He dragged the composer back on the platform, where some of the musicians still lingered, and there knelt and kissed his hand.
What has become of genial Mme. E., who played the Jupiter Symphonie with my mother, instead of hearing me through my scales, and lent me volumes of Tonkünstler-Lexikons to soothe her conscience, and gave us honey in the comb out of her garden of verbena and stocks?
It was there, nearer our own time, that Saint-Saëns's Symphonie avec Orgue and César Franck's Symphonie were played for the first time. But for a long time the Conservatoire seemed to take its name too literally, and to restrict its sphere to that of a museum for classical music. The Symphony in C minor was performed by them in 1808; the Heroic in 1811.
he "measured himself against Beethoven and Mozart" by playing in a public concert; at sixteen years of age he wrote his Première Symphonie. As he grew older he soaked himself in the music of Bach and Händel, and was able to compose at will after the manner of Rossini, Verdi, Schumann, and Wagner.
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.
Some of their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier's immortal Symphonie en Blanc Majeur, that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.
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