laise_ for full orchestra and
double choir.] Not only did he fill his scenes in the theatre with
swarming and riotous crowds, like those of the Roman Carnival in the
second act of _Benvenuto_ (anticipating by thirty years the crowds of
_Die Meistersinger_), but he created a music of the masses and a
colossal style. His model here was Beethoven; Beethoven of the Eroica,
of the C minor, of the A, and, above all, of the Ninth Symphony. He was
Beethoven's follower in this as well as other things, and the apostle
who carried on his work.[95] And with his understanding of material
effects and sonorous matter, he built edifices, as he says, that were
"Babylonian and Ninevitish,"[96] "music after Michelangelo,"[97] "on an
immense scale."[98]

[Footnote 95: "From Beethoven," says Berlioz, "dates the advent in art
of colossal forms" (_Memoires_, II, 112). But Berlioz forgot one of
Beethoven's models--Haendel. One must also take into account the
musicians of the French revolution: Mehul, Gossec, Cherubini, and
Lesueur, whose works, though they may not equal their intentions, are
not without grandeur, and often disclose the intuition of a new and
noble and popular art.]

[Footnote 96: Letter to Morel, 1855. Berlioz thus describes the
_Tibiomnes_ and the _Judex_ of his _Te Deum_. Compare Heine's judgment:
"Berlioz's music makes me think of gigantic kinds of extinct animals, of
fabulous empires.... Babylon, the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the
wonders of Nineveh, the daring buildings of Mizraim."]

[Footnote 97: _Memoires_, I, 17.]

[Footnote 98: Letter to an unknown person, written probably about 1855,
in the collection of Siegfried Ochs, and published in the _Geschichte
der franzoesischen Musik_ of Alfred Bruneau, 1904. That letter contains a
rather curious analytical catalogue of Berlioz's works, drawn up by
himself. He notes there his predilection for compositions of a "colossal
nature," such as the _Requiem_, the _Symphonie funebre et triomphale_,
and the _Te Deum_, or those of "an immense style," such as the
_Imperiale_.]

It was the _Symphonie funebre et triomphale_ for two orchestras and a
choir, and the _Te Deum_ for orchestra, organ, and three choirs, which
Berlioz loved (whose finale _Judex crederis_ seemed to him the most
effective thing he had ever written[99]), as well as the _Imperiale_,
for two orchestras and two choirs, and the famous _Requiem_, with its
"four orchestras of brass instruments, placed round the