Men as disparate as Schoenberg and
Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the
one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second through a
Gothic severity, the third through a machine-like regularity, to give
their work a new boldness, a new power and incisiveness of design.
Something of the same sharpness and sheerness was attained by Berlioz,
if not precisely by their means, at least to a degree no less remarkable
than theirs. He attained it through the nakedness of his melodic line.
The music of the "Requiem" is almost entirely a singularly powerful and
characteristic line. It is practically unsupported. Many persons
pretend that Berlioz wanted a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint.
Certainly his feeling for harmony was a very rudimentary one, in nowise
refined beyond that of his predecessors, very simple when compared to
that of his contemporaries, Chopin and Schumann. And his attempts at
creating counterpoint, judged from the first movement of "Harold in
Italy," are clumsy enough. But it is questionable whether this ignorance
did not stand him in good stead rather than in bad; and whether, in the
end, he did not make himself fairly independent of both these musical
elements. For the "Requiem" attains a new sort of musical grandeur from
its sharp, heavy, rectangular, rhythmically powerful melodic line.
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