Richard Strauss, in his edition of Berlioz's works on Instrumentation, paradoxically characterizes the classical orchestral style as that which was derived from chamber-music. Now it, is true that in Haydn's early days orchestras were small and generally private; and that the styles of orchestral and chamber music were not distinct; but surely nothing is clearer than that the whole history of the rise of classical chamber-music lies in its rapid differentiation from the coarse-grained orchestral style with which it began.
He also wrote a number of songs and orchestral works, of a realistic national type.
The beginning of Mendelssohn's F minor quartet is, again, a case usually, but perhaps wrongly, condemned for its orchestral appearance on paper.
The very sense of dramatic fitness has temporarily vanished from public musical opinion, together with the sense of musical form, in consequence of another prevalent habit, that of presenting shapeless extracts from Wagner's operas as orchestral pieces without voices or textbooks or any hint that such adjuncts are desirable.
A red-haired Jew, he possessed a magnetic and artistic temperament, and had various special methods of arousing and restraining the revolutionary masses, including orchestral and vocal concerts of high excellence in the formerly royal theatres and the opera house of Munich.
