And, in truth, to us as well, who have felt the great
cubical masses of the moderns and have heard the barbarian tread, the
sense of beauty that demanded the giant blocks of the "Requiem" music
seems still a little a strange and monstrous thing. It seems indeed an
atavism, a return to modes of feeling that created the monuments of
other ages, of barbarous and forgotten times. Well did Berlioz term his
work "Babylonian and Ninevitish"! Certainly it is like nothing so much
as the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer, vast tombs and ramparts and
terraces of Khorsabad and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun of
Assyria. Berlioz must have harbored some elemental demand for form
inherent in the human mind but buried and forgotten until it woke to
life in him again. For there is a truly primitive and savage power in
the imagination that could heap such piles of music, revel in the
shattering fury of trumpets, upbuild choragic pyramids. Here, before
Strawinsky and Ornstein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbarous
and radical and revolutionary, a music beside which so much of modern
music dwindles.
It has, primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of
contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years
there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and
fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of
"Pelleas et Melisande" in particular.
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