SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
first to be astonished
Think of the effect that such works must have produced at that period. Berlioz was the first to be astonished when he heard them for the first time. At the Ouverture des Francs-Juges he wept and tore his hair, and fell sobbing on the kettledrums. At the performance of his Tuba mirum, in Berlin, he nearly fainted. The composer who most nearly approached him was Weber, and, as we have already seen, Berlioz only knew him late in life. But how much less rich and complex is Weber’s music, in spite of its nervous brilliance and dreaming poetry. Above all, Weber is much more mundane and more of a classicist; he lacks Berlioz’s revolutionary passion and plebeian force; he is less expressive and less grand.
How did Berlioz come to have this genius for orchestration almost from the very first? He himself says that his two masters at the Conservatoire taught him nothing in point of instrumentation:–
«Lesueur had only very limited ideas about the art. Reicha knew the particular resources of most of the wind instruments; but I think that he had not very advanced ideas on the subject of grouping them.»
Berlioz taught himself. He used to read the score of an opera while it was being performed.
«It was thus,» he says,[68] «that I began to get familiar with the use of the orchestra, and to know its expression and timbre, as well as the range and mechanism of most of the instruments. By carefully comparing the effect produced with the means used to produce it, I learned the hidden bond which unites musical expression to the special art of instrumentation; but no one put me in the way of this. The study of the methods of the three modern masters, Beethoven, Weber, and Spontini, the impartial examination of the traditions of instrumentation and of little-used forms and combinations, conversations with virtuosi, and the effects I made them try on their different instruments, together with a little instinct, did the rest for me.»[69]
[Footnote 68: One may judge of this instinct by one fact: he wrote the overtures of Les Francs-Juges and Waverley without really knowing if it were possible to play them. «I was so ignorant,» he says, «of the mechanism of certain instruments, that after having written the solo in D flat for the trombone in the Introduction of Les Francs-Juges, I feared it would be terribly difficult to play. So I went, very anxious, to one of the trombonists of the Opera orchestra. He looked at the passage and reassured me. ‘The key of D flat is,’ he said, ‘one of the pleasantest for that instrument; and you can count on a splendid effect for that passage'» (Mémoires, I, 63).]
[Footnote 69: Mémoires, I, 64.]
this was: First To Be Astonished
go to next chapter: His Devilish Cleverness
