‘All the same, when the day came my throat tightened, as it did in times of great excitement, when this devil of a thing came on. First the trumpets gave out the rhythm, then the flutes and clarinets, with a pizzicato accompaniment of strings--softly outlining the air--the audience remaining calm and judicial. Then, as there came a long crescendo, broken by the dull beats of the big drum (as of distant cannon), a strange restless movement was perceptible among them--and, as the orchestra let itself go in a cataclysm of sweeping fury and thunder, they could contain themselves no longer. Their overcharged souls burst with a tremendous explosion of feeling that raised my hair with terror.’ This bass-drum beat pianissimo ‘as of distant cannon’ has never to this day lost its wild and mysterious potency. But it must not be supposed that the romanticists’ contribution to orchestration consisted mainly in isolated sensational effects. Their work was marvellously thorough and solid. Berlioz in particular had a wizard-like ear for discerning and developing subtleties of timbre. His great work on Orchestration (now somewhat passé but still stimulating and valuable to the student) abounds in the mention of them. He points out the poetic possibilities in the lower registers of the clarinets, little used before his day. He makes his famous notation as to the utterly different tone qualities of one violin and of several violins in unison, as though of different instruments. And so on through hundreds of pages. The scores of the romanticists abound in simple effects, unheard of before their time, which gain their end like magic. Famous examples come readily to mind: the muted violins in the high registers in the ‘Dance of the Sylphs’ from ‘The Damnation of Faust’; the clumsy bassoons for the dance of the ‘rude mechanicals’ in Mendelssohn’s incidental music to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; the morose viola solo which recurs through Berlioz’s ‘Harold in Italy’; the taps and rolls on the tympani to accompany the speeches of the devil in _Der Freischütz_ or the flutes in their lowest register in the accompaniment to Agathe’s air in the same opera--all these are representative of the richness of poetic imagination and understanding of orchestral possibilities in the composers of the romantic period. II