Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
For it makes us know, once for all, how infinitely much greater a musician you might have been, O miserable and magnificent Abbé Liszt! Berlioz The course of time, that has made so many musicians recede from us and dwindle, has brought Berlioz the closer to us and shown him great. The age in which he lived, the decades that followed his death, found him unsubstantial enough.
The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle. Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery. And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately assumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling, showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being.
At its close, the hero ascends the scaffold; amid a hush, the tender love theme reappears, but is obliterated by a sudden crash of the full orchestra, and all is still. Berlioz, however, does not let his hero rest in the grave, but adds a fifth movement to show him in the infernal regions.
During a brief sojourn in Paris, Wagner met Cosima, then a girl of sixteen, for the first time. She formed with Liszt, Von Bülow, Berlioz and a few others the very small, but extremely select, audience which, at the house of Liszt's mother, heard Wagner read selections from his "Nibelung" dramas.
Indeed, so repeatedly have temperaments of this character appeared in France, not only in her music, but also in her letters and other arts, from the time of the Pléiade, to that of Charles Louis Philippe and André Gide and Henri de Regnier, that it is difficult not to hold theirs the centrally, essentially French tradition, and not to see in men like Rabelais only the Frank, and in men like Berlioz only the atavism to Gallo-Roman times.
When Rimsky-Korsakoff uttered the pronouncement that a composition for orchestra could not exist before the orchestration was completed, he was only phrasing a rule upon which Berlioz had acted all his life. For Berlioz set out to learn the language of the orchestra.
With a strange anxious craving to see his fair employer he drove directly to No. 9 Rue Berlioz on his arrival in Paris. The impassive face of Jules Victor met his gaze at the door. "Madame, suddenly summoned to Poland, had begged Monsieur le Major to address her by letter, as telegrams were most unreliable in Russian Poland.
Berlioz gives an amusing account of his going to compete with the horde of applicants butchers, bakers, shop-apprentices, etc. each one with his roll of music under his arm. The manager scanned the raw-boned starveling with a look of wonder. "Where's your music?" quoth the tyrant of a third-class theatre. "I don't want any, I can sing anything you can give me at sight," was the answer.
He consoled himself with the saying of Berlioz: "Let us raise our heads above the miseries of life, and let us blithely sing the familiar gay refrain, Dies irae...." He used to sing it sometimes, to the dismay of his neighbors, who were amazed and shocked to hear him break off in the middle and shout with laughter. He led a life of stern chastity.
Compare him with Schumann, and the genuine romanticist tops the virtuoso. Berlioz, I suspect, was a magnified virtuoso. His orchestral technique is supreme, but his music fails to force its way into my soul.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking