[76]
[Footnote 75: _Memoires_, II, 361.]
[Footnote 76: M. Jean Marnold has remarked this genius for monody in
Berlioz in his article on _Hector Berlioz, musicien (Mercure de France_,
15 January, and 1 February, 1905).]
I have said that Berlioz had a matchless gift for expressing tragic
melancholy, weariness of life, and the pangs of death. In a general way,
one may say that he was a great elegist in music. Ambros, who was a very
discerning and unbiassed critic, said: "Berlioz feels with inward
delight and profound emotion what no musician, except Beethoven, has
felt before." And Heinrich Heine had a keen perception of Berlioz's
originality when he called him "a colossal nightingale, a lark the size
of an eagle." The simile is not only picturesque, but of remarkable
aptness. For Berlioz's colossal force is at the service of a forlorn and
tender heart; he has nothing of the heroism of Beethoven, or Haendel, or
Gluck, or even Schubert. He has all the charm of an Umbrian painter, as
is shown in _L'Enfance du Christ_, as well as sweetness and inward
sadness, the gift of tears, and an elegiac passion.
* * * * *
Now I come to Berlioz's great originality, an originality which is
rarely spoken of, though it makes him more than a great musician, more
than the successor of Beethoven, or, as some call him, the forerunner of
Wagner.
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