I have said that Berlioz had a matchless gift for expressing tragic melancholy, weariness of life, and the pangs of death.  In a general way, one may say that he was a great elegist in music.  Ambros, who was a very discerning and unbiassed critic, said:  “Berlioz feels with inward delight and profound emotion what no musician, except Beethoven, has felt before.”  And Heinrich Heine had a keen perception of Berlioz’s originality when he called him “a colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle.”  The simile is not only picturesque, but of remarkable aptness.  For Berlioz’s colossal force is at the service of a forlorn and tender heart; he has nothing of the heroism of Beethoven, or Haendel, or Gluck, or even Schubert.  He has all the charm of an Umbrian painter, as is shown in L’Enfance du Christ, as well as sweetness and inward sadness, the gift of tears, and an elegiac passion.

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Now I come to Berlioz’s great originality, an originality which is rarely spoken of, though it makes him more than a great musician, more than the successor of Beethoven, or, as some call him, the forerunner of Wagner.  It is an originality that entitles him to be known, even more fitly than Wagner himself, as the creator of “an art of the future,” the apostle of a new music, which even to-day has hardly made itself felt.

Berlioz is original in a double sense.  By the extraordinary complexity of his genius he touched the two opposite poles of his art, and showed us two entirely different aspects of music—­that of a great popular art, and that of music made free.

We are all enslaved by the musical tradition of the past.  For generations we have been so accustomed to carry this yoke that we scarcely notice it.  And in consequence of Germany’s monopoly of music since the end of the eighteenth century, musical traditions—­which had been chiefly Italian in the two preceding centuries—­now became almost entirely German.  We think in German forms:  the plan of phrases, their development, their balance, and all the rhetoric of music and the grammar of composition comes to us from foreign thought, slowly elaborated by German masters.  That domination has never been more complete or more heavy since Wagner’s victory.  Then reigned over the world this great German period—­a scaly monster with a thousand arms, whose grasp was so extensive that it included pages, scenes, acts, and whole dramas in its embrace.  We cannot say that French writers have ever tried to write in the style of Goethe or Schiller; but French composers have tried and are still trying to write music after the manner of German musicians.