Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/223

 progressively brought new features into orchestration—Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner—have arrived at this result far less by the introduction of new instruments than by a new manner of employing instruments already available. That is far more interesting. But we must emphasise the fact that this new use depended above all on the increase of the number of instruments, the enlargement of the orchestral mass. The realisation of the sound-colours that suited the imaginations of these artists depended essentially on this point; they had to have at their disposal a great increase of sound-material.

No one has so much enriched instrumental material as Wagner. Those who marvel (without being altogether right or altogether wrong) at the splendour of his orchestra should pay attention to this very important detail. These splendours have a cause that is partly mechanical. Wagner provided for his contemporaries the enchantment, no negligible one, of a mass of sound colours such as the human ear had not till then enjoyed. But the operation by which he arrived at this result has in itself nothing of magic or genius about it. It is an arithmetical operation. What was required more than anything else was to assemble the instruments of each group in sufficient number to draw from them effects to which in less numbers they did not lend themselves. As all musicians know (but it must be said for the benefit of the profane), this was not by way of making them sound louder, which would be a result of no interest in itself, but of making them produce, by their harmonic agglomeration, new sonorities. In the old orchestration the wood and the brass came in to add touches of colour on the practically permanent basis of the