SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
Italian and German influence
Some more rational minds have tried to rid themselves of this Italian and German influence, but have mostly arrived at creating an intermediate Germano-Italian style, of which the operas of Auber and Ambroise Thomas are a type.
Before Berlioz’s time there was really only one master of the first rank who made a great effort to liberate French music: it was Rameau; and, despite his genius, he was conquered by Italian art.[78]
By force of circumstance, therefore, French music found itself moulded in foreign musical forms. And in the same way that Germany in the eighteenth century tried to imitate French architecture and literature, so France in the nineteenth century acquired the habit of speaking German in music. 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.[79]
[Footnote 78: I am not speaking of the Franco-Flemish masters at the end of the sixteenth century: of Jannequin, Costeley, Claude le Jeune, or Mauduit, recently discovered by M. Henry Expert, who are possessed of so original a flavour, and have yet remained almost entirely unknown from their own time to ours. Religious wars bruised France’s musical traditions and denied some of the grandeur of her art.]
[Footnote 79: It is amusing to find Wagner comparing Berlioz with Auber, as the type of a true French musician–Auber and his mixed Italian and German opera. That shows how Wagner, like most Germans, was incapable of grasping the real originality of French music, and how he saw only its externals. The best way to find out the musical characteristics of a nation is to study its folk-songs. If only someone would devote himself to the study of French folk-song (and there is no lack of material), people would realise perhaps how much it differs from German folk-song, and how the temperament of the French race shows itself there as being sweeter and freer, more vigorous and more expressive.]
He was fitted in every way for the part, even by his deficiencies and his ignorance. His classical education in music was incomplete. M. Saint-Saëns tells us that «the past did not exist for him; he did not understand the old composers, as his knowledge of them was limited to what he had read about them.» He did not know Bach. Happy ignorance! He was able to write oratorios like L’Enfance du Christ without being worried by memories and traditions of the German masters of oratorio. There are men like Brahms who have been, nearly all their life, but reflections of the past. Berlioz never sought to be anything but himself. It was thus that he created that masterpiece, La Fuite en Égypte, which sprang from his keen sympathy with the people.
He had one of the most untrammelled spirits that ever breathed. Liberty was for him a desperate necessity. «Liberty of heart, of mind, of soul–of everything…. Real liberty, absolute and immense!»[80] And this passionate love of liberty, which was his misfortune in life, since it deprived him of the comfort of any faith, refused him any refuge for his thoughts, robbed him of peace, and even of the soft pillow of scepticism–this «real liberty» formed the unique originality and grandeur of his musical conceptions.
[Footnote 80: Mémoires, I, 221.]
«Music,» wrote Berlioz to C. Lobe, in 1852, «is the most poetic, the most powerful, the most living of all arts. She ought to be the freest, but she is not yet…. Modern music is like the classic Andromeda, naked and divinely beautiful. She is chained to a rock on the shores of a vast sea, and awaits the victorious Perseus who shall loose her bonds and break in pieces the chimera called Routine.»
The business was to free music from its limited rhythms and from the traditional forms and rules that enclosed it;[81] and, above all, it needed to be free from the domination of speech, and to be released from its humiliating bondage to poetry. Berlioz wrote to the Princess of Wittgenstein, in 1856:–
[Footnote 81: «Music to-day, in the vigour of her youth, is emancipated and free and can do what she pleases. Many old rules have no longer any vogue; they were made by unreflecting minds, or by lovers of routine for other lovers of routine. New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the breaking of ancient laws. Many forms have become too hackneyed to be still adopted. The same thing may be entirely good or entirely bad, according to the use one makes of it, or the reasons one has for making use of it. Sound and sonority are secondary to thought, and thought is secondary to feeling and passion.» (These opinions were given with reference to Wagner’s concerts in Paris, in 1860, and are taken from A travers chants, p. 312.)
this was: Italian And German Influence
go to next chapter: Beethoven’s Words
