The Life and Passion of Hector Berlioz [pp. 444-452]

441- APPLRI'OAS' JOURNAL.
THE LIFE AND PASSION OF HECTOR BERLIOZ.
" ERLIOZ," says M. Gounod, in the charm.L ing introduction which he wrote to the
recently collected letters of the great composer,
"was one of the profoundest emotions of my
youth. He was fifteen years my senior; he was,
therefore, thirty-four at the time when I, a boy
of nineteen, was studying composition at the
Conservatory, under the direction of Halevy. I
well remember the impression then produced
upon me by Berlioz and his works, rehearsals of
which were often given in the concert-hall of the
Conservatory. No sooner had my master Haldvy
corrected my lesson than I hastened from the
class to go and hide myself in a corner of the concert-room, and there I grew wild over that strange,
passionate, convulsive music which opened before
me such new and nobly colored horizons. One
day I had been present at a rehearsal of the then
unpublished symphony of'Romeo and Juliet,'
which Berlioz was to produce in public for the
first time a few days later. I was so struck with
the ampleness of the greatfinale of the reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets that I went
out, carrying away entire in my memory the
superb phrase of Friar Laurence,' 7urez tous
par l'auguste symbole!' A short time afterward, I called upon Berlioz, and, sitting down at
the piano, I played the above-mentioned passage.
He opened his eyes very widely, and, looking
sharply at me, he said,'Where in the world did
you get that?'' At one of your rehearsals,' I
answered. He could not believe his ears."
This little paragraph serves to show how
sincere is the admiration of the composer of the
opera of " Faust " for the great eccentric master
who wrote the "Damnation de Faust," which
Gounod himself qualifies as "magnificent." M.
Gounod speaks with tender affection of the extravagant, fantastic nature of Berlioz, of the nervous anger which prompted him to rail at Bellini
and Cherubini, and of the honest, confiding manner in which he poured out the secrets of his
soul to his friends. In the letters now published
the reader will find the impress of the real Berlioz
in almost every line. Some time since, a volume,
very carefully edited by M. Daniel Bernard, and
treating of the labors and travels of Berlioz, appeared in Paris. It gave but a poor idea of the
man of genius and his work, compared with that
which may be obtained from the composer's own
correspondence with one of his most intimate
friends. A perusal of these fiery letters fully
justifies the conclusions at which M. Gounod
arrived after reading them, and which he has
chronicled as follows:
" There are, in humanity, certain beings gifted
with particular sensitiveness, who feel nothing in
the same manner or degree as other people feel,
and for whom the exception becomes the rule.
In the cases of these persons, their peculiarities
of nature explain those of their lives, which, in
their turn, explain those of their destiny. Now,
these are the exceptions which lead the world;
and it should be so, because these are the ones
who pay with their battles and their sufferings
for the movement and the enlightenment of the
human race.... Berlioz was, like Beethoven,
one of the unfortunate victims of the dolorous
privilege of being an exception, and he paid dearly
for this heavy responsibility." And here M.
Gounod indulges in some sharp remarks upon
the revolt of the masses against any one who, in
the fine arts, dares to show individuality, or to
decry and desert conventional methods. "Was
it," he cries, "the crowd which formed Raphael
and Michael Angelo, Mozart and Beethoven, Newton and Galileo? The crowd! the mass! It
passes its whole existence in judging and taking
back its judgment, in condemning in rotation its
repugnances and its fascinations; and how can
you expect it to be a competent judge? Nothe crowd first flagellates and crucifies, and then
reviews its decrees with a repentance which,
generally, is not that of the contemporary generation, but of later ones; and it is on the tomb
of the man of genius that the crowns of immorbelles which were refused his brow are heaped.
The definite judge, which is posterity, is but a
superposition of successive minorities. Contemporary success is usually only a question of fashion; it proves that the work is up to the level of
its time, but by no means that it ought to survive
it; there is consequently no reason to be very
proud of it. Berlioz was a man all of one piece,
without concessions or compromises; he belonged to the race of'Alcestes,' and naturally
he had all the'Orontes' against him. Heaven
knows how numerous the'Orontes' are! People have found him crabbed, quarrelsome, fierce
-I don't know what else! But, in order to understand this excessive sensitiveness pushed to
the verge of irritability, it would be necessary to
take account of all the irritating things, the personal trials, the thousand rebuffs suffered by this
fiery soul, incapable of humble servility and
cowardly toadying; and it is noteworthy that,
however harsh his judgments may have seemed
to those upon whom they were pronounced, none
of them were ever attributed to the shameful
motive of a jealousy which would have been
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