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Updated: June 8, 2025
It is in the name of this opinion that so many people condemn a priori Berlioz's Roméo. They think it childish to try and translate action into music. I suppose they think it less childish to illustrate an action by music. Do they think that gesture associates itself very happily with music?
And Schumann quotes these words of Ernest Wagner: "He who shakes off the tyranny of time and delivers us from it will, as far as one can see, give back freedom to music." See Hector Berlioz und Robert Schumann. Berlioz was constantly righting for this freedom of rhythm for "those harmonies of rhythm," as he said. Remark also Berlioz's freedom of melody.
Not enough attention has been drawn to the classical nobility from which Berlioz's art so spontaneously springs. It is not fully acknowledged that he was, of all nineteenth-century musicians, the one who had in the highest degree the sense of plastic beauty. Nor do people always recognise that he was a writer of sweet and flowing melodies.
In the case of the Hungarian march, this has been done only at the sacrifice of Berlioz's poetical conceit to which the introductory text and music were fitted; but of this more presently. As Berlioz constructed the "Dramatic Legend," it belonged to no musical category. It is possible that this fact was long an obstacle to its production.
Let me hear from you again. Wholly thine, ZURICH, March 4th, 1852. How are you, most excellent of men? It is too long since I heard from you. The rehearsals of Cellini, many visits from abroad, several pieces and transcriptions for the pianoforte, have much occupied my time during the last month. Of the performance of Berlioz's opera H. gives a most detailed account in Brendel's paper.
Wagner, who treated his symphonies with scorn before he had even read them, who certainly understood his genius, and who deliberately ignored him, threw himself into Berlioz's arms when he met him in London in 1855.
To Faust is also presented a vision of Marguerite. The next five scenes in Berlioz's score are connected by M. Gunsbourg and forced to act in sequence for the sake of the stage set, in which a picture of Marguerite's chamber is presented in the conventional fashion made necessary by the exigency of showing an exterior and interior at the same time, as in the last act of "Rigoletto."
In an operatic form Berlioz's "Damnation de Faust" had its first representation in New York at the Metropolitan Opera-house on December 7, 1906. Despite its high imagination, its melodic charm, its vivid and varied colors, its frequent flights toward ideal realms, its accents of passion, its splendid picturesqueness, it presented itself as a "thing of shreds and patches."
And Chopin's harmonic feeling as well as Berlioz's orchestral wizardry played a rôle in Wagner's artistic education. But for all his incalculable indebtednesses, Wagner is the great initiator, the compeller of the modern period. It is not only because he summarized the old. It is because he began with force a revolution.
But the genius and industry of Berlioz were undeniable, and there was no excuse for such extreme measures. Prejudiced as were his judges, he successively took several important prizes. Berlioz's happiest evenings were at the Grand Opéra, for which he prepared himself by solemn meditation.
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