It
voices through it a bold, naked, immense language. With Baudelaire,
Berlioz could have said, "L'energie c'est le grace supreme." For the
beauty of this his masterpiece lies in just the delineating power, the
characteristic of this crude, vigorous, unadorned melody. Doubtless to
those still baffled by its nudity, his music appears thin. But if it is
at all thin, its thinness is that of the steel cable.
And it has the rhythmical vivacity and plenitude that characterizes the
newest musical art. If there is one quality that unites in a place apart
the Strawinskys and Ornsteins, the Blochs and Scriabines, it is the
fearlessness and exuberance and savagery with which they pound out
their rhythms. Something long buried in us seems to arise at the
vibration of these fierce, bold, clattering, almost convulsive strokes,
to seek to gesticulate and dance and leap. And Berlioz possessed this
elemental feeling for rhythm. Schumann was convinced on hearing the
"Symphonie Fantastique" that in Berlioz music was returning to its
beginnings, to the state where rhythm was unconstrained and irregular,
and that in a short while it would overthrow the laws which had bound it
so long. So, too, it seems to us, despite all the rhythmical innovations
of our time.
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