When
Rimsky-Korsakoff uttered the pronouncement that a composition for
orchestra could not exist before the orchestration was completed, he was
only phrasing a rule upon which Berlioz had acted all his life. For
Berlioz set out to learn the language of the orchestra. Not only did he
call for new instruments, instruments that have eventually become
integral portions of the modern bands, but he devoted himself to a study
of the actual natures and ranges and qualities of the old, and wrote the
celebrated treatise that has become the textbook of the science of
instrumentation. The thinness of much of his work, the feebleness of the
overture to "Benvenuto Cellini," for instance, results from his
inexperience in the new tongue. But he had not to practise long. It was
not long before he became the teacher of his very contemporaries. Wagner
owes as much to Berlioz's instrumentation as he owes to Chopin's
harmony.
But for the new men, he is more than teacher. For them he is like the
discoverer of a new continent. Through him they have come to find a new
fashion of apprehending the world. Out of the paint-box that he opened,
they have drawn the colors that make us see anew in their music the face
of the earth. The tone-poems of Debussy and the ballets of Ravel and
Strawinsky, the scintillating orchestral compositions of Strauss and
Rimsky and Bloch, could scarcely have come to be had not Berlioz called
the attention of the world to the instruments in which the colors and
timbres in which it is steeped, lie dormant.
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