SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
Berlioz’s genius
The zenith of Berlioz’s genius was reached, when he was thirty-five years old, with the Requiem and Roméo. 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.
But Berlioz was already getting old. His daily cares and stormy domestic life,[61] his disappointments and passions, his commonplace and often degrading work, soon wore him out and, finally, exhausted his power. «Would you believe it?» he wrote to his friend Ferrand, «that which used to stir me to transports of musical passion now fills me with indifference, or even disdain. I feel as if I were descending a mountain at a great rate. Life is so short; I notice that thoughts of the end have been with me for some time past.» In 1848, at forty-five years old, he wrote in his Mémoires: «I find myself so old and tired and lacking inspiration.» At forty-five years old, Wagner had patiently worked out his theories and was feeling his power; at forty-five he was writing Tristan and The Music of the Future. Abused by critics, unknown to the public, «he remained calm, in the belief that he would be master of the musical world in fifty years’ time.»[62]
[Footnote 61: He left Henrietta Smithson in 1842; she died in 1854.]
[Footnote 62: Written by Berlioz himself, in irony, in a letter of 1855.]
Berlioz was disheartened. Life had conquered him. It was not that he had lost any of his artistic mastery; on the contrary, his compositions became more and more finished; and nothing in his earlier work attained the pure beauty of some of the pages of L’Enfance du Christ (1850-4), or of Les Troyens (1855-63). But he was losing his power; and his intense feeling, his revolutionary ideas, and his inspiration (which in his youth had taken the place of the confidence he lacked) were failing him. He now lived on the past–the Huit scènes de Faust (1828) held the germs of La Damnation de Faust (1846); since 1833, he had been thinking of Béatrice et Bénédict (1862); the ideas in Les Troyens were inspired by his childish worship of Virgil, and had been with him all his life. But with what difficulty he now finished his task! He had only taken seven months to write Roméo, and «on account of not being able to write the Requiem fast enough, he had adopted a kind of musical shorthand»;[63] but he took seven or eight years to write Les Troyens, alternating between moods of enthusiasm and disgust, and feeling indifference and doubt about his work. He groped his way hesitatingly and unsteadily; he hardly understood what he was doing. He admired the more mediocre pages of his work: the scene of the Laocoon, the finale of the last act of the Les Troyens à Troie, the last scene with Aeneas in Les Troyens à Carthage.[64] The empty pomposities of Spontini mingle with the loftiest conceptions. One might say that his genius became a stranger to him: it was the mechanical work of an unconscious force, like «stalactites in a dripping grotto.» He had no impetus. It was only a matter of time before the roof of the grotto would give way. One is struck with the mournful despair with which he works; it is his last will and testament that he is making. And when he has finished it, he will have finished everything. His work is ended; if he lived another hundred years he would not have the heart to add anything more to it. The only thing that remains–and it is what he is about to do–is to wrap himself in silence and die.
[Footnote 63: Mémoires, I, 307.]
[Footnote 64: About this time he wrote to Liszt regarding L’Enfance du Christ: «I think I have hit upon something good in Herod’s scena and air with the soothsayers; it is full of character, and will, I hope, please you. There are, perhaps, more graceful and pleasing things, but with the exception of the Bethlehem duet, I do not think they have the same quality of originality» (17 December, 1854).]
this was: Berlioz’s Genius
go to next chapter: Mournful Destiny
