" For himself, Berlioz believed that the power of modern music
is of at least equal value with the doubtful anecdotes of ancient
historians. "How often," he says, "have we not seen hearers agitated
by terrible spasms, weep and laugh at once, and manifest all the
symptoms of delirium and fever, while listening to the masterpieces of
our great masters." He relates the case of a young Provencal musician,
who blew out his brains at the door of the Opera after a second
hearing of Spontini's "Vestale," having previously explained in a
letter, that after this ecstatic enjoyment, he did not care to remain
in this prosaic world; and the case of the famous singer Malibran,
who, on hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for the first time, at the
Conservatoire, "was seized with such convulsions that she had to be
carried out of the hall." "We have in such cases," Berlioz continues,
"seen time and again, serious men obliged to leave the room to hide
the violence of their emotions from the public gaze." As for those
feelings which Berlioz owed personally to music, he affirms that
nothing in the world can give an exact idea of them to those who have
not experienced them.
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