EDITORS’ NOTE ON THE TEXTS ON THIS AND FACING PAGES
Below and on the opposite pages are the two published versions of Heine’s “Musical Season” articles about Paris in 1844. To facilitate comparison, we offer the two articles line for line on facing pages, with text that appears only in one version or the other enclosed by brackets 〈…〉. Due to this method of presentation, artificial gaps appear in the texts of both versions.
Paris, April 25. 1
A tout seigneur tout honneur. 2 We begin today with Berlioz, whose first concert opened the musical season and could be regarded, so to speak, as the overture of the same. The more or less new pieces that were presented to the public here found the applause they deserved, and even the most sluggish hearts were swept away by the power of the genius that is revealed in all creations of the great Master. Here is a wing-beat that reveals no ordinary songbird, it is a colossal nightingale, a thrush the size of an eagle, of the sort that are said to have existed in prehistoric times. Indeed, for me, Berlioz’s music as a whole has something prehistoric, if not antediluvian, about it; it reminds me of extinct animal species, of fabulous kingdoms and sins, of piled-up impossibilities: of Babylon, of the hanging gardens of Semiramis, of Nineveh, of the wonders of Mizraim, such as we see in the paintings of the Englishman Martin. 3 Indeed, if we look around for an analogy in the art of painting, we find the most elective affinity 4 between Berlioz and the mad Briton—the same feeling for the uncanny, the gigantic, for material immeasurability. In the one, the harsh effects of light and shadow, in the other screeching instrumentation; in the one, little melody, in the other, little color; in both, little beauty and no sensibility at all. Their works are neither ancient nor romantic, they recall neither Greece nor the Catholic Middle Ages; instead, they reach up much higher, to the Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian period of architecture, and to the massive passion that was expressed in it.
What a properly modern man, in contrast, is our Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the much celebrated compatriot, whom we mention first of all, today, on account of the symphony that was given by him in the concert hall of the Conservatory. 5 We have the active zeal of his friends and