Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/134

they were lacking, and in the possibility of bold experiments on which they did not venture. Yet we bow before the results, charming or sublime, which the gifts of sensibility and inventiveness possessed by these great poets with a genius for the theatre were able to attain merely by the observance of more elementary and simpler laws than those which govern symphonic composition. The great thing is only to do what one can do; accordingly we do not find Glück and Grétry attempting what is beyond their powers, but not beyond the powers of Rameau, Mozart and Beethoven, trained athletes who could give play to every kind of suppleness, strength or fancy, wizards initiated in all the glorious devices and all the magic of the feast of sound. Meyerbeer did not copy this reserve. His unlucky symphonic efforts draw painful attention to this gap in his talent. His overtures offer the most convincing example. Look at that of the Huguenots, which aims at being a development of Luther's fine chant. No sooner has the theme been set out with the accompaniment of an apt and strong harmony than there begins the most pitiful, irrational and breathless working up. It is the same with the overture of Robert the Devil on the famous theme of the infernal evocation, and with the Coronation March in the Prophet. Well, I shall be told, Meyerbeer can afford to have condemnation passed on him on that point, according to the rule you have laid down yourself, if he has given all the necessary proofs of mastery and power in the form of dramatic composition. The question is not so simple where Meyerbeer is concerned. The majority of the French public of his time, who only knew music by the contemporary musicians of the theatre, lived in the