Berlioz loved (whose finale _Judex crederis_ seemed to him the most
effective thing he had ever written[99]), as well as the _Impériale_,
for two orchestras and two choirs, and the famous _Requiem_, with its
"four orchestras of brass instruments, placed round the 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: _Mémoires_, II, 364. See also the letter quoted above.]

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

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

[Footnote 102: _Mémoires_, I, 312.]