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Updated: June 8, 2025
This unexpected support, coming from a country of traditions, has thrown the partisans of Classic tradition into confusion, and rallied Berlioz's friends. But here is a new danger.
The world of to-day has but one opinion on both these questions. The force of Berlioz's character was phenomenal. His vitality was so passionate and active that brain and nerve quivered with it, and made him reach out toward experience at every facet of his nature. Quietude was torture, rest a sin, for this daring temperament.
That letter contains a rather curious analytical catalogue of Berlioz's works, drawn up by himself. Like the Requiem, these compositions are often crude in style and of rather commonplace sentiment, but their grandeur is overwhelming.
In 1861, Pasdeloup gave the first Concerts populaires de musique classique at the Cirque d'Hiver. The Berlioz Festival, organised by M. Reyer, on March 23rd, 1870, a year after Berlioz's death, revealed to France the grandeur of its greatest musical genius, and was the beginning of a campaign of public reparation to his memory.
Quite possibly it was then thought that in a spoken play only mad persons should sing, just as Wagner insists that in music-drama only mad persons should speak; and as a good deal of singing was required, there were a good many mad parts. Probably Purcell would have treated all Wagner's characters, and all Berlioz's, as utterly and irretrievably mad.
It seems to me that Strauss must have a secret affection for this work, which owes its inspiration to the undefinable impressions of convalescence. His fever fell asleep in it, and certain passages are full of the caressing touch of nature, and recall Berlioz's Les Troyens.
As most men speak more than they think, even thought itself became Germanised; and it was difficult then to discover, through this traditional insincerity, the true and spontaneous form of French musical thought. But Berlioz's genius found it by instinct. From the first he strove to free French music from the oppression of the foreign tradition that was suffocating it.
Berlioz berated all this music. He had seen Gluck's works on the stage in his youth, but he could see nothing in them that was not "superannuated and childish." With all respect to Berlioz's memory, it deserved a kinder judgment than that. When one reaches the depths of this music, although it may be at the price of some effort, he is well repaid for his pains.
I was present on both occasions, and shall tell you more about it when we meet. Today he returns to Paris, and at the end of April he is coming to Dresden, where Luttichau has offered him the chance of conducting two concerts at the theatre. There is also some talk of a musical festival under Berlioz's direction at Brunswick next summer, where his Requiem and Te Deum are to be performed.
In the general design and spirit there is much of the feeling of Berlioz's "Fantastic" Symphony, though the manner of the music shows no resemblance whatever. There is much more likeness to Liszt's "Faust" Symphony, in that the pervading recurrence of themes suggests symbolic labels. Moreover, in the very character of many of the motives, there is here a striking line of descent.
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