sitive orchestrators before him, men who were deeply aware of the
nature of their tools, men who, like Mozart, could scarcely repress
their tears at the sound of a favorite instrument, and wrote marvelously
for flutes and horns and oboes and all the components of their bands.
But matched with his, their knowledge of the instrument was patently
relative. For, with them, music had on the whole a general timbre.
Phrases which they assigned, say, to violins or flutes can be assigned
to other instruments without doing the composition utter damage. But in
the works of Berlioz music and instruments are inseparable. One cannot
at all rearrange his orchestration. Though the phrases that he has
written for bassoon or clarinet might imaginably be executed by other
instruments, the music would perish utterly in the substitution. What
instrument but the viola could appreciate the famous "Harold" theme? For
just as in a painting of Cezanne's the form is inseparable from the
color, is, indeed, one with it, so, too, in the works of Berlioz and the
moderns the form is part of the sensuous quality of the band. When
Rimsky-Korsakoff uttered the pronouncement that a composition for
orchestra could not exist before the orchestration was completed, he was
only phrasing a rule upon which Berlioz had acted all his life. For
Berlioz set out to learn the language of the orchestra. Not only did he
call for new instruments, instruments that have eventually become
integral portions of the modern bands, but he devoted himself to a study
of the actual natures and ranges and qualities of the old, and wrote the
celebrated treatise that has become the textbook of the science of
instrumentation. The thinness of much of his work, the feebleness of the
overture to "Benvenuto Cellini," for instance, results from his
inexperience in the new tongue. But he had not to practise long. It was
not long before he became the teacher of his very contemporaries. Wagner
owes as much to Berlioz's instrumentation as he owes to Chopin's
harmony.

But for the new men, he is more than teacher. For them he is like the
discoverer of a new continent. Through him they have come to find a new
fashion of apprehending the world. Out of the paint-box that he opened,
they have drawn the colors that make us see anew in their music the face
of the earth. The tone-poems of Debussy and the ballets of Ravel and
Strawinsky, the scintillating orchestral compositions of Strauss and
Rimsky a