"They are: simple friends, who admire in good faith all that is to be done on the stage before the lamps are lighted; relations, those _claqueurs_ given by nature; editors, ferocious _claqueurs_; and especially lovers and husbands. That is why women, besides the host of other advantages they have over men, have still one more chance of success than they. For a woman can hardly applaud her husband or lover to any purpose in a theatre or concert room; besides, she always has something else to do; while the husband or lover, provided he has the least natural capacity or some elementary notions of the art, can often bring about a success of renewal at the theatre.... Husbands are better than lovers for this sort of operation. The latter usually stand in fear of ridicule; they also fear _in petto_ that a too brilliant success may make too many rivals; they no longer have any pecuniary interest in the triumphs of their mistresses. But the husband, who holds the purse-strings, who knows what can be done by a well-thrown bouquet, a well taken-up salvo, a well-communicated emotion, a well-carried recall, he alone dares to turn to account what faculties he has. He has the gift of ventriloquism and of ubiquity. He applauds for an instant from the amphitheatre, crying out: _Brava!_ in a tenor voice, in chest tones; thence he flies to the lobby of the first boxes, and sticking his head through the opening cut in the door, he throws out an _Admirable!_ in a voice of _basso profundo_ while passing by, and then bounds breathless up to the third tier, from whence he makes the house resound with exclamations: 'Delicious! ravishing! Heavens! what talent! it is too much!' in a _soprano_ voice, in shrill feminine tones stifled with emotion. There is a model husband for you, and a hard-working and intelligent father of a family."
The impression of paradox so markedly given by Berlioz's prose writings, in which such insight, wit, and good humor as we have here coexist with the tendency to pose revealed in his accounts of his love affairs, is intensified by his musical compositions. In them also he seems actuated by a desire, not to communicate his real feelings in their simplicity, but to project them into a dramatic conception, and to present that with all the pomp and circumstance of which he is capable. Not truth to inner experience, but vividness of external effect, is his ideal. Yet to the service of this ideal he brings admirable intellectual qualities: ingenuity, resourcefulness, imagination, an originality that scorns all platitude, and, at least in the matter of instrumentation, a matchless technical skill. The brilliant performance of rather specious undertakings--that is Berlioz's artistic cue.