Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/224

 quartet. In the Wagnerian orchestration they provide of themselves completely fixed and startling colours, self-sufficient and capable of filling the whole picture. Certainly taste is required for the right employment of these colours when once one has them on the palette. But creating them was only a question of mass. Let us not confuse the effects of the big gun with the conceptions of strategy. And one may speak here of the big gun without the comparison being too forced. For besides the multiplication of the brass instruments already in use, Wagner added to the orchestra brasses of unheard of size which were manufactured for him, the tuba, the saxotromba, the double-bass trombone, which are really instrumental big guns.

Yes, it is a question of mass as well as a question of taste, a question of arithmetic as well as a question of poetry. These torrents and overflows of brilliance, this sparkling and incandescence, these azures and hyper-azures of orchestral colour, this phenomenal bigness, both "quantitative" and "qualitative" of the orchestra, were called for by the workings of Wagner's imagination just as the body calls for a garment that will fit it. There was fitness in the association of this form with this basis. The one required the other. It is unreasonable therefore to criticise, in itself and taken separately, Wagner's style of orchestration, as though Wagner, conceiving what he did conceive and feeling as he felt, could have been free to adopt any other manner of orchestration. His orchestration is what it had to be.

But surely everyone can see that such a remark, so far from enslaving our taste to the seductions of the Wagnerian orchestration, absolutely sets it free and