SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
for two orchestras and a choir
It was the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale for two orchestras and a choir, and the Te Deum for orchestra, organ, and three choirs, which Berlioz loved (whose finale Judex crederis seemed to him the most effective thing he had ever written[99]), as well as the Impériale, for two orchestras and two choirs, and the famous Requiem, with its «four orchestras of brass instruments, placed round the main orchestra and the mass of voices, but separated and answering one another at a distance.» Like the Requiem, these compositions are often crude in style and of rather commonplace sentiment, but their grandeur is overwhelming. This is not due only to the hugeness of the means employed, but also to «the breadth of the style and to the formidable slowness of some of the progressions–whose final aim one cannot guess–which gives these compositions a strangely gigantic character.»[100] Berlioz has left in these compositions striking examples of the beauty that may reveal itself in a crude mass of music. Like the towering Alps, they move one by their very immensity. A German critic says: «In these Cyclopean works the composer lets the elemental and brute forces of sound and pure rhythm have their fling.»[101] It is scarcely music, it is the force of Nature herself. Berlioz himself calls his Requiem «a musical cataclysm.»[102]
[Footnote 99: Mémoires, II, 364. See also the letter quoted above.]
[Footnote 100: Mémoires, II, 363. See also II, 163, and the description of the great festival of 1844, with its 1,022 performers.]
[Footnote 101: Hermann Kretzschmar, Führer durch den Konzertsaal.]
[Footnote 102: Mémoires, I, 312.]
These hurricanes are let loose in order to speak to the people, to stir and rouse the dull ocean of humanity. The Requiem is a Last Judgment, not meant, like that of the Sixtine Chapel (which Berlioz did not care for at all) for great aristocracies, but for a crowd, a surging, excited, and rather savage crowd. The Marche de Rakoczy is less an Hungarian march than the music for a revolutionary fight; it sounds the charge; and Berlioz tells us it might bear Virgil’s verses for a motto:–
» … Furor iraque mentes Praecipitant, pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis.»[103]
When Wagner heard the Symphonic funèbre et triomphale he was forced to admit Berlioz’s «skill in writing compositions that were popular in the best sense of the word.»
«In listening to that symphony I had a lively impression that any little street boy in a blue blouse and red bonnet would understand it perfectly. I have no hesitation in giving precedence to that work over Berlioz’s other works; it is big and noble from the first note to the last; a fine and eager patriotism rises from its first expression of compassion to the final glory of the apotheosis, and keeps it from any unwholesome exaggeration. I want gladly to express my conviction that that symphony will fire men’s courage and will live as long as a nation bears the name of France.»[104]
[Footnote 103: Letter to some young Hungarians, 14 February, 1861. See the Mémoires, II, 212, for the incredible emotion which the Marche de Rakoczy roused in the audience at Budapest, and, above all, for the astonishing scene at the end:–
«I saw a man enter unexpectedly. He was miserably clad, but his face shone with a strange rapture. When he saw me, he threw himself upon me and embraced me with fervour; his eyes filled with tears, and he was hardly able to get out the words, ‘Ah, monsieur, monsieur! moi Hongrois … pauvre diable … pas parler Français … un poco Italiano. Pardonnez mon extase…. Ah! ai compris votre canon…. Oui, oui, la grande-bataille…. Allemands chiens!’ And then striking his breast violently: ‘Dans le coeur, moi … je vous porte…. Ah! Français … révolutionnaire … savoir faire la musique des révolutions!'»]
[Footnote 104: Written 5 May, 1841.]
How do such works come to be neglected by our Republic? How is it they have not a place in our public life? Why are they not part of our great ceremonies? That is what one would wonderingly ask oneself if one had not seen, for the last century, the indifference of the State to Art. What might not Berlioz have done if the means had been given him, or if his works had found a place in the fêtes of the Revolution? Unhappily, one must add that here again his character was the enemy of his genius. As this apostle of musical freedom, in the second part of his life, became afraid of himself and recoiled before the results of his own principles, and returned to classicism, so this revolutionary fell to sullenly disparaging the people and revolutions; and he talks about «the republican cholera,» «the dirty and stupid republic,» «the republic of street-porters and rag-gatherers,» «the filthy rabble of humanity a hundred times more stupid and animal in its twitchings and revolutionary grimacings than the baboons and orang-outangs of Borneo.»[105]
[Footnote 105: Berlioz never ceased to inveigh against the Revolution of 1848–which should have had his sympathies. Instead of finding material, like Wagner, in the excitement of that time for impassioned compositions, he worked at L’Enfance du Christ. He affected absolute indifference–he who was so little made for indifference. He approved the State’s action, and despised its visionary hopes.] What ingratitude! He owed to these revolutions, to these democratic storms, to these human tempests, the best of all his genius–and he disowned it all. This musician of a new era took refuge in the past.
this was: For Two Orchestras And A Choir
go to next chapter: magnificent roads for Art
