(3 of 3)
having to do it: "Oh, let them give me scores to write, orchestras
to conduct, rehearsals to direct; let me stand eight or ten hours at
a time, baton in hand, training choirs without accompaniments,
singing their refrains myself, and beating time until I spit blood and till
my arm is paralyzed by cramp; let me carry desks, basses, harps,
remove steps, nail planks like a commissionaire or a carpenter, and, by
way of a rest, let me correct proofs or copies at night. . . . But
everlastingly to have to write feuilletons for one's bread! To write
nothings about nothings! To bestow lukewarm praises on insupportable
insipidities! To speak one day of a great master and the next of an
idiot, with the same gravity, in the same language! . . ."
Disappointments increased. Outside France, Berlioz was recognized more
& more as an uneven genius whose audacious use of instruments was
affecting all orchestral writing, but Parisians in the 1860's were
flocking to hear the operas of Meyerbeer, Gounod, Offenbach. Berlioz'
brain at the end was thoroughly befuddled by the opium he took to
relieve his intestinal neuralgia. His writings dwindled to a series of
sentimental letters addressed to an old lady who had been his
adolescent idol. Five years before his death he wrote: "I have
neither hopes, nor illusions, nor great thoughts left." Publisher
Knopf, if he were so inclined, could take the same pessimistic tone
concerning books on music. Ten years' experience has taught him
that they will not sell.— But music is his hobby. He has musical
friends—Sergei Koussevitzky, Sir Thomas Beecham, Leopold Stokowski.
Paul Kochanski, Jascha Heifetz. Musical books are becoming a specialty
of his house just as horsey books are with Scribner, explorers' books
with Putnam, young Yalemen's novels with Doubleday, Doran.
*MEMOIRS OF HECTOR BEREIOZ—Annotated and edited— by Ernest
Newman—Knopf ($5). To be published Oct. 15. *Of the many excellent
ones that he has published only two have paid for themselves: Wagner
as Man and Artist by Ernest-Newman (2,424 copies) and My Musical
Life by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakoff (3,830 copies).
