Berlioz “is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of music. In his earliest years, as in his latest, Berlioz was himself, a solitary figure, owing practically nothing to other people’s music, an artist we may say, without ancestry and without posterity. Mozart builds upon Haydn and influences Beethoven; Beethoven imitates Mozart and in turn influences the practice of all later symphonists; Wagner learns from Weber and gives birth to a host of imitators. But with Berlioz—and it is a point to be insisted on—there is no one whose speech he tried to copy in his early years and there is no one since who speaks with _his_ voice. How many things in the early Beethoven were made in the factory of Mozart! How many times does the early Wagner speak with the voice of Weber! But who can turn over the scores of Berlioz’s early works and find a single phrase that can be fathered upon any previous, or contemporary, writer? There was never any one, before his time or since, who thought and wrote just like him; his musical style especially is absolutely his own. Now and then in _L’Enfance du Christ_ he suggests Gluck—not in the turn of his phrases but in the general atmosphere of an aria; but apart from this it is the rarest thing for him to remind us of any other composer. His melody, his harmony, his rhythm, are absolutely his own.”[75] In nothing did the originality of Berlioz show itself more strikingly than in his treatment of the Orchestra. So many of his ideas and effects were used, and carried still further, by Wagner that some of the richness and beauty of tone of the modern Orchestra that we usually give to Wagner belongs rightfully to Hector Berlioz. For instance, Berlioz discovered the value of _pianissimo_ brass effects; he discovered the ethereal charm of harmonies on divided violins; he discovered the true worth of the viola; he introduced the harp into the Symphony Orchestra; he grouped instruments into families and got from them rich chords in different shades of the same tone-color; he advocated the tuba as a substitution for the coarser ophicleide; he made many experiments with the kettledrums and other instruments of percussion; he divided the strings into many parts (one of his scores calls for five double-basses); and he also advocated the sunken and hidden Orchestra, which Wagner realized in his theatre of Bayreuth. Wagner frankly confesses his debt to this French genius. “Berlioz was diabolically clever,” he wrote: “I made a minute study of his instrumentation as early as 1840 in Paris and I have often taken up his scores since. I profited greatly both as regards what to do and what to leave undone.” It is absurd to say that without Berlioz there would have been no Wagner; but it is no exaggeration to say that without Berlioz there might have been a Wagner very different from the one we know.