Berlioz’s melodies are apt to be dry and even cerebral in their character, but this one for Harold is as beautiful as one could wish: [Illustration: Music score] The ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is by many considered Berlioz’s finest work. It is in two parts, the first including a number of choruses and recitatives narrating the course of the tragedy, and the second developing various pictures selected out of the action. The love scene is ‘pure’ music of the highest beauty, and the scherzo, based on the ‘Queen Mab’ speech, is one of Berlioz’s most typical inventions. All these compositions antedate by a number of years the works of Liszt and Wagner, which make extended use of Berlioz’s means. Wagner describes at length how the idea of leit-motifs occurred to him during his composition of ‘The Flying Dutchman’ (completed in 1841), but he was certainly familiar with Berlioz’s works. Liszt was from the first a great admirer of Berlioz, and greatly helped to extend his reputation through his masterly piano arrangements of the Frenchman’s works. His development of the leit-motif in his symphonic poems is frankly an adaptation of the Berlioz idea. Liszt’s dramatic symphonies are two--‘Dante’ and ‘Faust’--by which, doubtless, if he had his way, his name would chiefly be known among the nations. We have seen in an earlier chapter how deeply Liszt was impressed by the great paintings in Rome, and how in his youth he dreamed of some later Beethoven who would translate Dante into an immortal musical work. In the quiet of Weimar he set himself to accomplish the labor. The work is sub-titled ‘Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise,’ but it is in two movements, the Purgatory leading into, or perhaps only to, the gate of Heaven. The first movement opens with one of the finest of all Liszt’s themes, designed to express Dante’s [Illustration: Music score]