A Polemical Biography
Berlioz. By W. J. Turner. (Dent. 10s. 6d.)
IT is a pity that Mr. Turner should have found it necessary, in writing this book, to proceed on the robbing-Peter-to-pay- Paul system. Berlioz, as he points out with justifiable in- sistence, was a unique figure in music and a great composer ; to prove this it was not in the least necessary to invent a villain—i.e., Wagner, against whom to play off the hero. Mr. Turner will alienate sympathy, where he might have enlisted it, by the wild and ill-judged nature of his charges against Wagner. But this is not to deny that his book is an interesting one ; stimulating it certainly is—to exasperation, often to agreement, sometimes to simple laughter. The story of Berlioz's life, enlivened though it was by fantastic incidents lacking to the lives of most composers, and by the extraordinary verve and brilliance of his letters and memoirs, makes on the whole a depressing effect. For somehow he never quite "got there." Again and again, the definitive success that should have proved his pretentions and given Will the place he felt (and rightly) to be his, in contemporary fame, eluded him. True, his concerts were acclaimed and his worki flatteringly reviewed ; the public applauded. And yet . , and yet . . . These words, with their three dots, might well serve as Berlioz's epitaph ; for they express what all musicians —even those who have been strong apologists for the composer —feel (except, apparently, Mr. Turner) : that in spite of the highest qualities of genius, imagination, daring, originality, invention, the music of Berlioz, except at moments, lacks that quality of continuous indubitability which characterize the greatest of his peers. I say " his peers," because there can be no question of not ranking the composer of Les Troyens and the Te Deum among the very greatest. Mr. Turner rightly insists upon the soul-stirring experience a first hearing of these (and other) works confers on a sensitive musical intelligence. But no service is done to an artist by refusing, as Mr. Turner refuses, to acknowledge that he has any faults and even those (and I number myself among them) whii receive the most intense pleasure from Berlioz's best work are apt to feel that he sometimes lets them down, at the unexpected moments, by a certain weakness of progression and of cadence, by sudden dismaying descents into coarse- ness and vulgarity of material (a curious barrel-organ quality, very noticeable in Strauss but disconcerting on the much higher plane on which Berlioz habitually thought and felt), and by long passages of sterile dullness. On the whole I am inclined to think that this weakness of harmonic and thematic progression lies at the bottom of one's fre- quent discomfiture in listening to Berlioz, and it is all the more disconcerting for its sudden occurrence in the midst of the extraordinary tenseness and originality of line, which is typical of the composer at his best. Such passage, occur rarely, if at all, in. Les Troyens, the Requiem and the Te Dcuni ; but they are obvious enough in Harold in Italy, in tile Romeo and Juliet Symphony (magnificent as some of this is), in Laio (one of his least successful works).
Mr. Turner has some interesting things to say on the non- pathological nature of Berlioz's music. This is a truth which needed stating, in view of the popular conception of the eoni: poser of the Fantastic Symphony. His music, in.spite of the intensely exalted nature of the emotion expressed in it, has a strikingly objective quality, a sort of passionate purity which gives it that strange but umnistakabie ring, as of a large cup of beaten metal, which is the distinguishing mark of his music. It is this quality, too, which makes his best operas so wonder- fully• original, though Mr. Turner's pert comparisons with Wagner here do Berlioz nothing but disservice. It is strange. at this time of day, to hear a critic of Mr. Turner's experience complain of " padding " in Wagner's operas. Wagner's art was peculiarly one of development : the same theme is not, as Mr. Turner alleges, just repeated over and over again, but sub- jected to every conceivable nuance in the working out of a highly complex form. This was not Berlioz's method, which adheres to an earlier form of opera—that of Gluck ; the form is built up in blocks of varying sizes and shapes, not developed, as with Wagner, in a continuous stream. The two kinds arc dissimilar and there is no use in comparing them. Yet. if one must do so, the fact is plain that Wagner was a far more skilled librettist than Berlioz himself, or than those who supplied his texts, which are for the most part extremely clumsily constructed and insufficiently dramatic.
On the question of character Mr. Turner is on surer ground : Berlioz's was a noble and distinguished nature ; which, is more than can be said of Wagner's. The latter did not appre- ciate Berlioz as fully as he might have done, and Mr. Turner makes great play with the . fact. But he might have done better than to quote Berlioz's remark about the Prelude to Tristan—that it has " no other theme than a sort of chromatic moan "—which is as foolish a statement as any Wagner ever made about Berlioz.
I could have wished that in the passages dedicated to the music itself Mr. Turner had been less vague.. His descriptions of the various movements in Berlioz's works resemble those in a recent biography of Liszt: they confine themselves to stock phrases of emphatic praise and 'wonderment, without attempting to give an idea of the actual thematic and harmonic quality of the music.
But dogmatic assertion (" fatheads "—" bumptious pun- dits "—" there are devitalized people alive today who call themselves critics and even poets (poets, mark you !), who have the habit of sneering at men of genius such as Shelley and Berlioz ") is Mr. Turner's strongest point. His method will not appeal to those who like well-reasoned, scholarly apprecia-, tion ; but to those who enjoy a colourful portrait, seasoned with frantic, uncritical admiration and a great deal of rather comically naive abuse, levelled at all and sundry, this book can be recommended. . EDWARD SACKVILLE WEST.
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