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Musicians of To-Day by Romain Rolland
page 64 of 300 (21%)
disdain, his soul was with the masses. M. Hippeau applies to him Taine's
definition of a romantic artist: "the plebeian of a new race, richly
gifted, and filled with aspirations, who, having attained for the first
time the world's heights, noisily displays the ferment of his mind and
heart." Berlioz grew up in the midst of revolutions and stories of
Imperial achievement. He wrote his cantata for the _Prix de Rome_ in
July, 1830, "to the hard, dull noise of stray bullets, which whizzed
above the roofs, and came to flatten themselves against the wall near
his window."[93] When he had finished this cantata, he went, "pistol in
hand, to play the blackguard in Paris with the _sainte canaille_." He
sang the _Marseillaise_, and made "all who had a voice and heart and
blood in their veins"[94] sing it too. On his journey to Italy he
travelled from Marseilles to Livourne with Mazzinian conspirators, who
were going to take part in the insurrection of Modena and Bologna.
Whether he was conscious of it or not, he was the musician of
revolutions; his sympathies were with the people.

[Footnote 93: _Mémoires_, I, 155.]

[Footnote 94: These words are taken from Berlioz's directions on the
score of his arrangement of the _Marseillaise_ for full orchestra and
double choir.] Not only did he fill his scenes in the theatre with
swarming and riotous crowds, like those of the Roman Carnival in the
second act of _Benvenuto_ (anticipating by thirty years the crowds of
_Die Meistersinger_), but he created a music of the masses and a
colossal style. His model here was Beethoven; Beethoven of the Eroica,
of the C minor, of the A, and, above all, of the Ninth Symphony. He was
Beethoven's follower in this as well as other things, and the apostle
who carried on his work.[95] And with his understanding of material
effects and sonorous matter, he built edifices, as he says, that were
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