The personality that could beat out exuberantly music as
rhythmically various and terse and free must indeed have possessed a
primitive naivete and vitality and spontaneity of impulse. What
manifestation of unbridled will in that freedom of expression! Berlioz
must have been blood-brother to the savage, the elemental creature who
out of the dark and hidden needs of life itself invents on his rude
musical instrument a mighty rhythm. Or, he must have been like a
powerful and excited steed, chafing his bit, mad to give his energy
rein. His blood must forever have been craving the liberation of turgid
and angular and irregular beats, must forever have been crowding his
imagination with new and compelling combinations, impelling him to the
movements of leaping and marching. For he seems to have found in
profusion the accents that quicken and lift and lance, found them in
all varieties, from the brisk and delicate steps of the ballets in "La
Damnation de Faust" to the large, far-flung momentum that drives the
choruses of the "Requiem" mountain high; from the mad and riotous
finales of the "Harold" symphony and the "Symphonie Fantastique" to the
red, turbulent and _canaille_ march rhythms, true music of insurgent
masses, clangorous with echoes of tocsins and barricades and
revolutions.
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