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Moussorgsky did not approve of Wagner's gigantic orchestral apparatus; he wished to avoid all that would distract the spectator from the stage for him Wagner was too much "symphonist," not enough dramatist. Action, above all, no thematic development in the academic sense, were the Russian's watchwords.
Boito thinks like a symphonist, and his purpose is profoundly poetical, but its appreciation asks more than the ordinary opera-goer is willing or able to give. Bayard Taylor's Translation. "Mefistofele" had its first performance in New York at the Academy of Music on November 24, 1880. Mlle.
As a symphonist he displayed fertility in picturesque sonorities, facility in tracing the outlines and filling in the details of form, keen sense of balance of orchestral tone, thorough scientific knowledge of his materials, and, as some one has said, became all but a master in the highest sense.
He bears a message to the listener, which it is greatly to his interest to get at. The Mass in C depicts our innermost experiences. It has a mission and is not simply an end in itself. The Symphonist here shows his individuality as may be expected, since it was composed after Coriolanus, the first four symphonies, Fidelio.
At this time Beethoven was barely tolerated in Paris, and the great symphonist was ruthlessly clipped and shorn to suit the French taste, which pronounced him "bizarre, incoherent, diffuse, bustling with rough modulations and wild harmonies, destitute of melody, forced in expression, noisy, and fearfully difficult," even as England at the same time frowned down his immortal works as "obstreperous roarings of modern frenzy."
His overtures are unquestionably romantic, and as their histrionic and scenic titles indicate, partake of the nature of programme music. This brings us to Hector Berlioz, the famous French symphonist, the exponent par excellence of programme music, that is, music intended to illustrate a special story.
It seems almost as if the Wagnerians chose their champion in the symphony with a kind of suppressed contempt for learning, associating mere intellectuality with true mastery, pointing to an example of greatest skill and least inspiration as if to say: "Here is your symphonist if you must have one."
The First Symphony calls for special mention as in it the future Symphonist is already foreshadowed. He was almost a beginner at orchestral work, but it marks an epoch in this class of composition, raising it far beyond anything of the kind that had yet appeared. Viewed in the light of later ones it is apparent that he held himself in; that he was tentative compared with his subsequent ones.
Beethoven took up his quarters in the theatre again as soon as the libretto was ready for him and went to work at it with a will. But he was not at his best in operatic writing, this symphonist, this creator of great orchestral forms. The opera was an alien soil to him; composition never an easy matter to Beethoven, was more difficult than ever in the case of Fidelio.
On its decorative side, it was the same phenomenon in music as the Baroque school in architecture: an energetic struggle to enliven organic decay by mechanical oddities and novelties. Meyerbeer was no symphonist.
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