the night to write it down), the song of the students, “Jam nox stellata velamina pandit” (of which the words are also Berlioz’s), at Breslau.  He finished the work in Rouen and Paris, at home, at his cafe, in the gardens of the Tuilleries, even on a stone in the Boulevard du Temple.  While in Vienna he made an orchestral transcription of the famous Rakoczy march (in one night, he says, though this is scarcely credible, since the time would hardly suffice to write down the notes alone).  The march made an extraordinary stir at the concert in Pesth when he produced it, and this led him to incorporate it, with an introduction, into his Legend—­a proceeding which he justified as a piece of poetical license; he thought that he was entitled to put his hero in any part of the world and in any situation that he pleased.

This incident serves to indicate how lightly all dramatic fetters sat upon Berlioz while “La Damnation” was in his mind, and how little it occurred to him that any one would ever make the attempt to place his scenes upon the stage.  In the case of the Hungarian march, this has been done only at the sacrifice of Berlioz’s poetical conceit to which the introductory text and music were fitted; but of this more presently.  As Berlioz constructed the “Dramatic Legend,” it belonged to no musical category.  It was neither a symphony with vocal parts like his “Romeo et Juliette” (which has symphonic elements in some of its sections), nor a cantata, nor an oratorio.  It is possible that this fact was long an obstacle to its production.  Even in New York where, on its introduction, it created the profoundest sensation ever witnessed in a local concert-room, it was performed fourteen times with the choral parts sung by the Oratorio Society before that organization admitted it into its lists.

And now to tell how the work was fitted to the uses of the lyric theatre.  Nothing can be plainer to persons familiar with the work in its original form than that no amount of ingenuity can ever give the scenes of the “Dramatic Legend” continuity or coherency.  Boito, in his opera, was unwilling to content himself with the episode of the amour between Faust and Marguerite; he wanted to bring out the fundamental ethical idea of the poet, and he went so far as to attempt the Prologue in Heaven, the Classical Sabbath, and the death of Faust with the contest for his soul.  Berlioz had no scruples of any kind.  He chose his scenes from Goethe’s poem, changed them at will, and interpolated an incident simply to account for the Hungarian march.  Connection with each other the scenes have not, and some of the best music belongs wholly in the realm of the ideal.  At the outset Berlioz conceived Faust alone on a vast field in Hungary in spring.  He comments on the beauties of nature and praises the benison of solitude.  His ruminations are interrupted by a dance of peasants and the passage of an army to the music of the Rakoczy march.  This scene M. Gunsbourg changes to a picture