“A Concert in 1846”, caricature by Andreas Geiger from Cham. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The caricatures of the day drew him like this: Berlioz on the podium like an artillery general, and among the instruments of the orchestra a cannon. They laughed at the gigantism of his forces, but they had caught the point: no one before him had thought of the orchestra as a precision weapon. And indeed it was he who wrote its manual: the Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, Paris 1844, the first great book devoted entirely to the art of orchestrating.
Before the Treatise, orchestration was learned in the workshop and not talked about: manuals taught harmony and counterpoint, instruments were a practical matter. Berlioz promoted them to poetic subject. The book surveys every instrument, register by register, but not as a technical catalogue: as a gallery of characters. The clarinet has for him the register of love and the noble tones of tragedy; the oboe the voice of wounded innocence; the muted violin the colour of an apparition. These are a poet’s judgments, debatable one by one, and precisely for that reason the Treatise educated the ear of everyone who came after: Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky studied it, and half a century later Richard Strauss judged it still so alive that he republished it with his own additions, updating it to Wagner. In the Melos library both versions sit side by side, the French original and Strauss’s revision: reading them in parallel is a course in the history of orchestral sound.
The paradox is that the author was, among the great figures of the nineteenth century, the least of an instrumentalist: he played guitar and flute, no piano. Perhaps that is why he felt the orchestra as no keyboard virtuoso could: it was his only instrument, and he played it in writing. Anyone who wants to hear the Treatise in action need only put on the Symphonie fantastique, written, as it happens, fourteen years before the book, by the same man of the pistols and the disguise: timpani tuned so that they can play chords, violins tapping out the dance of the skeletons with the wood of the bow, the bells of the witches’ sabbath. Every effect that cinema has made familiar to us today, he tested first, and then had the courtesy to explain the trick.