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Updated: June 8, 2025
How much finer, to my idea, are Berlioz's recitatives, with their long and winding rhythms, than Wagner's declamations, which apart from the climax of a subject, where the air breaks into bold and vigorous phrases, whose influence elsewhere is often weak limit themselves to the quasi-notation of spoken inflections, and jar noisily against the fine harmonies of the orchestra.
Without you we should assuredly have been lost." "Yes," said the composer, "I know it well," accompanying his words with an expression of countenance betokening suspicion of Habeneck's honesty of purpose. The violinist little dreamed that this gratification of his weakness for snuff-taking would be regarded in the pages of Berlioz's Memoirs as having been indulged in from base motives.
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.
The poet goes on to say: "Berlioz's music, in general, has in it something primeval if not antediluvian to my mind; it makes me think of gigantic species of extinct animals, of fabulous empires full of fabulous sins, of heaped-up impossibilities; his magical accents call to our minds Babylon, the hanging gardens the wonders of Nineveh, the daring edifices of Mizraim, as we see them in the pictures of the Englishman Martin."
If they do not feel the wonderful freedom of Berlioz's music, and do not see that it was the delicate veil of a very living spirit, then I think there will be more of archaism than real life in their pretensions to "free music." In the one what light grace there is, in the other what vibrating passion, and in both of them what freedom and apt expression of ideas.
All the rest is moonshine to me with the sole exception of Berlioz's "Cellini." For this work I retain my great predilection, which you will not think uncalled for when you know it better. Next week I shall have to rehearse "Tell," and the opera will be given in a fortnight. "Tannhauser" will follow immediately afterwards. As our new tenor, Dr.
Now I come to Berlioz's great originality, an originality which is rarely spoken of, though it makes him more than a great musician, more than the successor of Beethoven, or, as some call him, the forerunner of Wagner.
To learn the meaning of this, one must go to the libretto, where he may read that it is all a dream dreamed by Marguerite after she had fallen asleep in her arm-chair. But we see her awake, not asleep, and it is all foolish and disturbing stuff put in to fill time and connect two of Berlioz's scenes.
Now Sacchini, for some reason or other which I do not know, did not use clarinets once in the whole score. Benoist was commissioned to add them when the work was revived, as he told me as we were chatting one day. Berlioz did not know this, and Benoist, who had not read Berlioz's Traité, knew nothing of the romantic musician's enthusiastic admiration of his work.
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 masses 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.
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