ld be noticed that Berlioz's observations in
his _Traite d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes_ (1844) have
not been lost upon Richard Strauss, who has just published a German
edition of the work, and some of whose most famous orchestral effects
are realisations of Berlioz's ideas.]

Think of the effect that such works must have produced at that period.
Berlioz was the first to be astonished when he heard them for the first
time. At the _Ouverture des Francs-Juges_ he wept and tore his hair, and
fell sobbing on the kettledrums. At the performance of his _Tuba mirum_,
in Berlin, he nearly fainted. The composer who most nearly approached
him was Weber, and, as we have already seen, Berlioz only knew him late
in life. But how much less rich and complex is Weber's music, in spite
of its nervous brilliance and dreaming poetry. Above all, Weber is much
more mundane and more of a classicist; he lacks Berlioz's revolutionary
passion and plebeian force; he is less expressive and less grand.

How did Berlioz come to have this genius for orchestration almost from
the very first? He himself says that his two masters at the
Conservatoire taught him nothing in point of instrumentation:--

"Lesueur had only very limited ideas about the art. Reicha knew the
particular resources of most of the wind instruments; but I think
that he had not very advanced ideas on the subject of grouping
them."

Berlioz taught himself. He used to read the score of an opera while it
was being performed.

"It was thus," he says,[68] "that I began to get familiar with the
use of the orchestra, and to know its expression and timbre, as
well as the range and mechanism of most of the instruments. By
carefully comparing the effect produced with the means used to
produce it, I learned the hidden bond which unites musical
expression to the special art of instrumentation; but no one put me
in the way of this. The study of the methods of the three modern
masters, Beethoven, Weber, and Spontini, the impartial examination
of the traditions of instrumentation and of little-used forms and
combinations, conversations with virtuosi, and the effects I made
them try on their different instruments, together with a little
instinct, did the rest for me."[69]

[Footnote 68: One may judge of this instinct by one fact: he wrote the
overtures of _Les Francs-Juges_ and _Waverley_ without re