main orchestra
and the mass of voices, but separated and answering one another at a
distance." Like the _Requiem_, these compositions are often crude in
style and of rather commonplace sentiment, but their grandeur is
overwhelming. This is not due only to the hugeness of the means
employed, but also to "the breadth of the style and to the formidable
slowness of some of the progressions--whose final aim one cannot
guess--which gives these compositions a strangely gigantic
character."[100] Berlioz has left in these compositions striking
examples of the beauty that may reveal itself in a crude mass of music.
Like the towering Alps, they move one by their very immensity. A German
critic says: "In these Cyclopean works the composer lets the elemental
and brute forces of sound and pure rhythm have their fling."[101] It is
scarcely music, it is the force of Nature herself. Berlioz himself calls
his _Requiem_ "a musical cataclysm."[102]

[Footnote 99: _Memoires_, II, 364. See also the letter quoted above.]

[Footnote 100: _Memoires_, II, 363. See also II, 163, and the
description of the great festival of 1844, with its 1,022 performers.]

[Footnote 101: Hermann Kretzschmar, _Fuehrer durch den Konzertsaal_.]

[Footnote 102: _Memoires_, I, 312.]

These hurricanes are let loose in order to speak to the people, to stir
and rouse the dull ocean of humanity. The _Requiem_ is a Last Judgment,
not meant, like that of the Sixtine Chapel (which Berlioz did not care
for at all) for great aristocracies, but for a crowd, a surging,
excited, and rather savage crowd. The _Marche de Rakoczy_ is less an
Hungarian march than the music for a revolutionary fight; it sounds the
charge; and Berlioz tells us it might bear Virgil's verses for a
motto:--

" ... Furor iraque mentes
Praecipitant, pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis."[103]

When Wagner heard the _Symphonic funebre et triomphale_ he was forced to
admit Berlioz's "skill in writing compositions that were popular in the
best sense of the word."

"In listening to that symphony I had a lively impression that any
little street boy in a blue blouse and red bonnet would understand
it perfectly. I have no hesitation in giving precedence to that
work over Berlioz's other works; it is big and noble from the first
note to the last; a fine and eager patriotism rises from its first
expression of compassion to the final glory of the apotheosis, and