The revolution of 1848 called from the mud
the sewermen. Flaubert, his face to the past, gazed sorrowfully
at Carthage and wrote an epic of the French bourgeois. Zola and
his crowd delved into a moral morass, and the world grew weary of
them. And then the faint, fading flowers of romanticism were put
into albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are
pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Berlioz, mad Hector of
the flaming locks, whose orchestral ozone vivified the scores of
Wagnerand Liszt, began to sound garishly empty, brilliantly
superficial; "the colossal nightingale" is difficult to classify
even to-day. A romantic by temperament he unquestionably was. But
then his music, all color, nuance, and brilliancy, was not
genuinely romantic in its themes. Compare him with Schumann, and
the genuine romanticist tops the virtuoso. Berlioz, I suspect,
was a magnified virtuoso. His orchestral technique is supreme,
but his music fails to force its way into my soul. It pricks the
nerves, it pleases the sense of the gigantic, the strange, the
formless, but there is something uncanny about it all, like some
huge, prehistoric bird, an awful Pterodactyl with goggle eyes,
horrid snout and scream.
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