It is more probable that Berlioz was simply lying, as he often did about these matters. If it seemed easy in retrospect it must have been because he enjoyed every moment of rigorous self-criticism. In The Musical Language of Berlioz, Julian Rushton writes:īerlioz remarked of the love-duet in Act IV that the music “settled on this scene like a bird on ripe fruit,” yet it took him sixteen pages of sketches to get it right. A comparison of the love music of the earlier Roméo et Juliette with the love duet in Act IV of The Trojans, “ O nuit d’ivresse,” shows the later work, beautiful as it is, to be much closer to the music of Gounod (who did, indeed, admire this particular number). In order to achieve this more conventional seriousness, Berlioz renounced some of his audacity. It is the only French grand opera since the works of Cherubini, Berlioz’s hated master, to be untouched by cheap melodrama and to attain the genuine seriousness of the high academic style. The Trojans is the musical equivalent of the grandes machines that the so-called pompiers displayed at the mid-century salons-a pretentious historical costume drama, life-size and imperturbably earnest. Like Delacroix’s mural decorations for the National Assembly, Berlioz’s finest opera reconciles avant-grade technique with academic ideals. Berlioz’s greatest work, most critics would now argue, is The Trojans, an opera on the most classical of all subjects and the most academic: Virgil’s Aeneid. In spite of Schumann’s obstinate aspiration to aesthetic respectability through his symphonies, quartets, and sonatas, his short, fragmentary piano pieces and songs remain his most enduring achievement. In this he differed from a composer like Schumann, whose genius was tied to a profoundly eccentric sense of form and of polyphony. Berlioz’s eccentricities impressed almost everyone, as he hoped and expected, but it has taken more than a century to realize that it is not Berlioz’s oddity but his normalcy, his ordinariness that made him great. He took up arms for Shakespeare, for Goethe’s Faust, Oriental exoticism, program music, the Swiss mountains with the lonely sound of shepherd’s pipes, the Gothic macabre, the projection of the ego in the work of art, as well as the artist as inspired lunatic-all the commonplace, intellectual bric-a-brac of the period, in fact.
What is the implicit political element in chopin music skin#
Mendelssohn’s gibes show that Berlioz’s contemporaries were already aware how much of his romantic madness was only skin deep although he fought passionately for the cause of romanticism. With all its recognition of Berlioz’s genius, this is disingenuous and ungracious, particularly in the way Verdi insists on Berlioz’s influence on Wagner without acknowledging his own debt, which was enormous, and not solely in the realm of instrumentation. He always went to extremes, even when he was doing admirable things. He lacked the calm and what I may call the balance that produce complete works of art. (The Wagnerians won’t admit it, but it is true.) He had no moderation. He had a real feeling for instrumentation, anticipated Wagner in many instrumental effects. More than fifty years later Verdi wrote:īerlioz was a poor, sick man who raged at everyone. Years of the kind of misunderstanding revealed in his comments must have eroded Berlioz’s friendly good nature. He considered the music “indifferent drivel, mere grunting, shouting and screaming back and forth,” but thought the composer himself a “friendly, quiet, meditative person” with an acute critical sense for everything except his own work, and he was depressed by the contrast. Perhaps the cruelest remark ever made about Berlioz came from Mendelssohn, who said that what was so Philistine about Berlioz was that “with all his efforts to go stark mad he never once succeeds.” Donald Francis Tovey, who quotes this in his essay on Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, 1 comments that “from its own standpoint the criticism was neither unfriendly nor untrue.” (I feel sure that Berlioz would have found it unfriendly.) Mendelssohn, in fact, liked Berlioz personally.
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