But during the last ten years great progress in
music has been made in France.]
Remark also Berlioz's freedom of melody. His musical phrases pulse and
flow like life itself. "Some phrases taken separately," says Schumann,
"have such an intensity that they will not bear harmonising--_as in many
ancient folk-songs_--and often even an accompaniment spoils their
fulness."[89] These melodies so correspond with the emotions, that they
reproduce the least thrills of body and mind by their vigorous
workings-up and delicate reliefs, by splendid barbarities of modulation
and strong and glowing colour, by gentle gradations of light and shade
or imperceptible ripples of thought, which flow over the body like a
steady tide. It is an art of peculiar sensitiveness, more delicately
expressive than that of Wagner; not satisfying itself with the modern
tonality, but going back to old modes--a rebel, as M. Saint-Saens
remarks, to the polyphony which had governed music since Bach's day, and
which is perhaps, after all, "a heresy destined to disappear."[90]
[Footnote 89: _Ibid_. "A rare peculiarity," adds Schumann, "which
distinguishes nearly all his melodies.
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