CHAPTER IV - BERLIOZ IN ENGLAND

Summary

Of the three great masters with whose memories the movement called, for want of a better name, “The Music of the Future” will be identified, two had comparatively little connection with England. They came to this country, just as a hundred virtuosi and composers came and come to this country, in order to propagate their music or to fill their pockets with the coin of the realm. Their artistic devolopment would have been exactly the same had they never approached these shores, or had they never read a line of English literature. For although Wagner duly appreciated Shakespeare and Walter Scott, and Liszt was a great admirer of Byron and carried a well-thumbed copy of “Childe Harold” with him on all his wanderings, even as did Napoleon a copy of “Werther,” it cannot be said that either of them derived any artistic stimulus from these great writers. But this is entirely different in the case of the French master who completes the triad of the Musical Future. If Berlioz had not known Shakespeare ; if he had not married an English, or at least an Irish wife; if he had not spent much of his time in this country, he would certainly not have been Berlioz. Perhaps he would have been Auber, or Meyerbeer, or a mixture of both. His mental and sentimental affinities with English life and literature began, indeed, years before the white cliffs of the perfidt Albion loomed on the sight of the seafarer; and with these antecedent affinities it will be necessary to deal in a more or less summary fashion before the immediate subject of this chapter, “Berlioz in England,” can be approached or properly understood.