Tschaikowsky’s symphonies are revealed in this far earlier music:  the tempestuous rage of what might be called an hysterical school, and the same poignant beauty of the lyric episodes; the sheer contrast, half trick, half natural, of fierce clangor and dulcet harmonies, all painted with the broad strokes of the orchestral palette.  Doubly striking it is how Liszt foreshadowed his later followers and how he has really overshadowed them; not one, down to the most modern tone-painters, has equalled him in depth and breadth of design, in the original power of his tonal symbols.  It seems that Liszt will endure as the master-spirit in this reactionary phase of the symphony.

Berlioz is another figure of a bold innovator, whose career seemed a series of failures, yet whose music will not down.  His art was centred less upon the old essentials, of characteristic melody and soul-stirring harmonies, than upon the magic strokes of new instrumental grouping,—­a graphic rather than a pure musical purpose.  And so he is the father not only of the modern orchestra, but of the fashion of the day that revels in new sensations of startling effects, that are spent in portraying the events of a story.

Berlioz was the first of a line of virtuosi of the orchestra, a pioneer in the art of weaving significant strains,—­significant, that is, apart from the music.  He was seized with the passion of making a pictured design with his orchestral colors.  Music, it seems, did not exist for Berlioz except for the telling of a story.  His symphony is often rather opera.  A symphony, he forgot, is not a musical drama without the scenery.  This is just what is not a symphony.  It is not the literal story, but the pure musical utterance.  Thus Berlioz’s “Romeo and Juliet” symphony is in its design more the literal story than is Shakespeare’s play.  And yet there is ever a serious nobility, a heroic reach in the art of Berlioz, where he stands almost alone among the composers of his race.  Here, probably, more than in his pictured stories, lies the secret of his endurance.  He was, other than his followers, ever an idealist.  And so, when we are on the point of condemning him as a scene-painter, we suddenly come upon a stretch of pure musical beauty, that flowed from the unconscious rapture of true poet.  As the bee sucks, so may we cull the stray beauty and the more intimate meaning, despite and aside from this outer intent.

CHAPTER III

BERLIOZ.  “ROMEO AND JULIET.”

DRAMATIC SYMPHONY

In the sub-title we see the growing impulse towards graphic music.  A “dramatic symphony” is not promising.  For, if music is the most subjective expression of the arts, why should its highest form be used to dramatize a drama?  Without the aid of scene and actors, that were needed by the original poet, the artisan in absolute tones attempts his own theatric rendering.  Clearly this symphony is one of those works of art which within an incongruous form (like certain ancient pictures) affords episodes of imperishable beauty.