[Footnote 80: _Memoires_, I, 221.]
"Music," wrote Berlioz to C. Lobe, in 1852, "is the most poetic,
the most powerful, the most living of all arts. She ought to be the
freest, but she is not yet.... Modern music is like the classic
Andromeda, naked and divinely beautiful. She is chained to a rock
on the shores of a vast sea, and awaits the victorious Perseus who
shall loose her bonds and break in pieces the chimera called
Routine."
The business was to free music from its limited rhythms and from the
traditional forms and rules that enclosed it;[81] and, above all, it
needed to be free from the domination of speech, and to be released from
its humiliating bondage to poetry. Berlioz wrote to the Princess of
Wittgenstein, in 1856:--
[Footnote 81: "Music to-day, in the vigour of her youth, is emancipated
and free and can do what she pleases. Many old rules have no longer any
vogue; they were made by unreflecting minds, or by lovers of routine for
other lovers of routine. New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the
sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the
breaking of ancient laws.
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