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Updated: June 15, 2025
Experience shows conclusively that the most powerful stimulant of the composer's brain is the possession of a really poetic and dramatic text. To take only one instance it surely cannot be a mere coincidence that the best works of four great composers Spohr, Berlioz, Gounod, and Schumann, are based on the story of "Faust."
As soon as the programme is settled I shall send it to you; for the present I tell you only that the "Tannhauser" overture will make the commencement of the first concert and the "Lohengrin" pieces the close of the second. In addition to this, there will be two pieces by Berlioz, the finale of Mendelssohn's "Loreley," the Ninth Symphony, etc.
They had nothing in common save their great love of art and their distrust of established forms. Berlioz abhorred enharmonic modulations, dissonances resolved indefinitely one after another, continuous melody and all current practices of futuristic music.
Wolf's work consists chiefly, as we have already seen, of Lieder, and these Lieder are characterised by the application to lyrical music of principles established by Wagner in the domain of drama. That does not mean he imitated Wagner. One finds here and there in Wolf's music Wagnerian forms, just as elsewhere there are evident reminiscences of Berlioz.
I doubt if Berlioz would have obtained any consideration at all from lovers of classical music in France if he had not found allies in that country of classical music, Germany "the oracle of Delphi," "Germania alma parens," as he called her. Some of the young German school found inspiration in Berlioz.
They are his two most important works, and are two works about which one may feel very differently. For my part, I am very fond of the one, and I dislike the other; but both of them open up two great new roads in art, and both are placed like two gigantic arches on the triumphal way of the revolution that Berlioz started. I will return to the subject of these works later.
Music is a hundred times more expressive and exact than speech; and it is not only her right to express particular emotions and subjects, it is her duty. If that duty is not fulfilled, the result is not music it is nothing at all. Berlioz is thus the true inheritor of Beethoven's thought.
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.
And though this freedom is mainly the result of indifference, it has, however, permitted the more independent temperaments to develop in peace from Berlioz to M. Ravel. One should be grateful for this.
Poor Berlioz was crushed by the weight of the obligations he had assumed, and, as the years went on, the peevish plaints of an invalid wife, who had lost her beauty and power of charming, withered the affection which had once been so fervid and passionate.
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