an 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.

Why be astonished at it? Let us face the matter plainly. In music we
have not, so to speak, any masters of French style. All our greatest
composers are foreigners. The founder of the first school of French
opera, Lulli, was Florentine; the founder of the second school, Gluck,
was German; the two founders of the third school were Rossini, an
Italian, and Meyerbeer, a German; the creators of _opera-comique_ were
Duni, an Italian, and Gretry, a Belgian; Franck, who revolutionised our
modern school of opera, was also Belgian. These men brought with them a
style peculiar to their race; or else they tried to found, as Gluck did,
an "international" style,[77] by which they effaced the more individual
characteristics of the French spirit. The most French of all these
styles is the _opera-comique_, the work of two foreigners, but owing
much more to th