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Updated: June 8, 2025
Weingartner expressed the surprise he felt when, imbued with current prejudice against Berlioz's lack of melodic invention, he opened, by chance, the score of the overture of Benvenuto and found in that short composition, which barely takes ten minutes to play, not one or two, but four or five melodies of admirable richness and originality:
The iron laws that bound the art of Wagner are not to be found in Berlioz's early works, which give one the illusion of perfect freedom. To these terrible grammarians who, two hundred years ago, criticised Molière on account of his "jargon" I shall reply by quoting Schumann.
For Berlioz's colossal force is at the service of a forlorn and tender heart; he has nothing of the heroism of Beethoven, or Händel, or Gluck, or even Schubert. He has all the charm of an Umbrian painter, as is shown in L'Enfance du Christ, as well as sweetness and inward sadness, the gift of tears, and an elegiac passion.
Berlioz's mind, perturbed and inflamed with the mighty images of the Shakespearean world, swept with wide, powerful passion toward Shakespeare's interpreter. He raged and stormed with his accustomed vehemence, made no secret of his infatuation, and walked the streets at night, calling aloud the name of the enchantress, and cooling his heated brows with many a sigh.
Though it is natural that Germany, more musical than France, should recognise the grandeur and originality of Berlioz's music before France, it is doubtful whether the German nature could ever fully understand a soul so French in its essence. It is, perhaps, what is exterior in Berlioz, his positive originality, that the Germans appreciate. They prefer the Requiem to Roméo.
It is the word I read in the portrait before me as I write these lines the beautiful portrait of the Mémoires, where his face looks out in sad and stern reproach on the age that so misunderstood him. "Berlioz's loneliness is not only one of external circumstances; its origin is in his temperament.
"Berlioz's harmonies, in spite of the diversity of their effect, obtained from very scanty material, are distinguished by a sort of simplicity, and even by a solidity and conciseness, which one only meets with in Beethoven.... One may find here and there harmonies that are commonplace and trivial, and others that are incorrect at least according to the old rules.
Thus Berlioz's "Romeo and Juliet" symphony is in its design more the literal story than is Shakespeare's play. And yet there is ever a serious nobility, a heroic reach in the art of Berlioz, where he stands almost alone among the composers of his race. Here, probably, more than in his pictured stories, lies the secret of his endurance. He was, other than his followers, ever an idealist.
It contains five scenes: The Peasants Going to Chapel; The Flower Girls; The Vagabonds; The Tryst; The Sabot Dance; and the Entrance of the Mayor, which is a pompous march. On the occasion of a performance of this, Louis Arthur Russell wrote: "His orchestra is surely French, and as modern as you please. The idiom is Berlioz's rather than Wagner's." John Knowles Paine.
And I shall not dwell on Berlioz's love of Nature, which, as M. Prudhomme shows us, is the soul of a composition like the Damnation and, one might say, of all great compositions. No musician, with the exception of Beethoven, has loved Nature so profoundly.
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