and Arion
Societies.

Berlioz has left in his Autobiography an extremely interesting account of
the manner in which he composed it. Though he had had the plan of the
work in his mind for many years, it was not until 1846 that he began the
legend. During this year he was travelling on a concert-tour through
Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and Silesia, and the different numbers were
written at intervals of leisure. He says:--

"I wrote when I could and where I could; in the coach, on the railroad,
in steamboats, and even in towns, notwithstanding the various cares
entailed by my concerts."

He began with Faust's invocation to Nature, which was finished "in my old
German post-chaise." The introduction was written in an inn at Passau,
and at Vienna he finished up the Elbe scene, Mephistopheles' song, and
the exquisite Sylph's ballet. As to the introduction of the Rakoczy
march, his words deserve quoting in this connection, as they throw some
light on the general character of the work. He says:--

"I have already mentioned my writing a march at Vienna, in one night,
on the Hungarian air of Rakoczy. The extraordinary effect it produced
at Pesth made me resolve to introduce it in Faust, by taking the
liberty of placing my hero in Hungary at the opening of the act, and
making him present at the march of a Hungarian army across the plain. A
German critic considered it most extraordinary in me to have made Faust
travel in such a place. I do not see why, and I should not have
hesitated in the least to bring him in in any other direction if it
would have benefited the piece. I had not bound myself to follow
Goethe's plot, and the most eccentric travels may be attributed to such
a personage as Faust without transgressing the bounds of possibility.
Other German critics took up the same thesis, and attacked me with even
greater violence about my modifications of Goethe's text and plot; just
as though there were no other Faust but Goethe's, and as if it were
possible to set the whole of such a poem to music without altering its
arrangement. I was stupid enough to answer them in the preface to the
'Damnation of Faust.' I have often wondered why I was never reproached
about the book of 'Romeo and Juliet,' which is not very like the
immortal tragedy. No doubt because Shakspeare was not a German.
Patriotism! Fetichism! Idiotcy!"

One night when he had lost his way in Pesth he wrote the choral r