Note 60 — RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

It is worth noting how Berlioz justified his own setting of some passages in Roméo et Juliette orchestrally instead of vocally. "If," he says, "in the celebrated scenes of the garden and the cemetery, the dialogue of the two lovers, the a parte of Juliet and the passionate outbursts of Romeo are not vocalised, if, in short, the duets of love and despair are confided to the orchestra, the reasons for this are numerous and easy to grasp. First, because we are dealing with a symphony, not with an opera. Secondly, duets of this nature having been treated vocally a thousand times, and by the greatest masters, there was both prudence and curiosity in trying another mode of expression. It is, moreover, because the very sublimity of this love made the painting of it so dangerous for the musician, that he had to give his imagination a latitude which the positive connotations of chanted words would not have permitted him, by resorting to the instrumental language—a language richer, more varied, less restricted, and by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in cases of this kind."