Musicians of To-Day | Page 9

disgust all those who remember
that when Berlioz married Henrietta Smithson she brought as dowry
nothing but debts; and that he had only three hundred francs himself,
which a friend had lent him.]

[Footnote 26: Liszt repudiated him later.]
[Footnote 27: Written in an article on the Ouverture de Waverley
(_Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_).]
Wagner, who treated his symphonies with scorn before he had even
read them,[28] who certainly understood his genius, and who
deliberately ignored him, threw himself into Berlioz's arms when he
met him in London in 1855. "He embraced him with fervour, and wept;
and hardly had he left him when The Musical World published
passages from his book, Oper und Drama, where he pulls Berlioz to
pieces mercilessly."[29] In France, the young Gounod, doli fabricator
Epeus, as Berlioz called him, lavished flattering words upon him, but
spent his time in finding fault with his compositions,[30] or in trying to
supplant him at the theatre. At the Opera he was passed over in favour
of a Prince Poniatowski.
[Footnote 28: Wagner, who had criticised Berlioz since 1840, and who
published a detailed study of his works in his Oper und Drama in 1851,
wrote to Liszt in 1855: "I own that it would interest me very much to
make the acquaintance of Berlioz's symphonies, and I should like to see
the scores. If you have them, will you lend them to me?"]
[Footnote 29: See Berlioz's letter, cited by J. Tiersot, _Hector Berlioz et
la société de son temps_, p. 275.]
[Footnote 30: _Roméo, Faust, La Nonne sanglante_.]
He presented himself three times at the Academy, and was beaten the
first time by Onslow, the second time by Clapisson, and the third time
he conquered by a majority of one vote against Panseron, Vogel,
Leborne, and others, including, as always, Gounod. He died before the
Damnation de Faust was appreciated in France, although it was the
most remarkable musical composition France had produced. They
hissed its performance? Not at all; "they were merely indifferent"--it is
Berlioz who tells us this. It passed unnoticed. He died before he had
seen Les Troyens played in its entirety, though it was one of the noblest
works of the French lyric theatre that had been composed since the

death of Gluck.[31] But there is no need to be astonished. To hear these
works to-day one must go to Germany. And although the dramatic
work of Berlioz has found its Bayreuth--thanks to Mottl, to Karlsruhe
and Munich--and the marvellous Benvenuto Cellini has been played in
twenty German towns,[32] and regarded as a masterpiece by
Weingartner and Richard Strauss, what manager of a French theatre
would think of producing such works?
But this is not all. What was the bitterness of failure compared with the
great anguish of death? Berlioz saw all those he loved die one after the
other: his father, his mother, Henrietta Smithson, Marie Recio. Then
only his son Louis remained.
[Footnote 31: I shall content myself here with noting a fact, which I
shall deal with more fully in another essay at the end of this book: it is
the decline of musical taste in France--and, I rather think, in all
Europe--since 1835 or 1840. Berlioz says in his _Mémoires_: "Since
the first performance of _Roméo et Juliette_ the indifference of the
French public for all that concerns art and literature has grown
incredibly" (_Mémoires_, II, 263). Compare the shouts of excitement
and the tears that were drawn from the dilettanti of 1830 (_Mémoires_,
I, 81), at the performances of Italian operas or Gluck's works, with the
coldness of the public between 1840 and 1870. A mantle of ice covered
art then. How much Berlioz must have suffered. In Germany the great
romantic age was dead. Only Wagner remained to give life to music;
and he drained all that was left in Europe of love and enthusiasm for
music. Berlioz died truly of asphyxia.]
[Footnote 32: Here is an official list of the towns where Benvenuto has
been played since 1879 (I am indebted for this information to M. Victor
Chapót, Berlioz's grandnephew). They are, in alphabetical order: Berlin,
Bremen, Brunswick, Dresden, Frankfort-On-Main,
Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Hamburg, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Leipzig,
Mannheim, Metz, Munich, Prague, Schwerin, Stettin, Strasburg,
Stuttgart, Vienna, and Weimar.]
He was the captain of a merchant vessel; a clever, good-hearted boy,
but restless and nervous, irresolute and unhappy, like his father. "He

has the misfortune to resemble me in everything," said Berlioz; "and
we love each other like a couple of twins."[33] "Ah, my poor Louis,"
he wrote to him, "what should I do without you?" A few months
afterwards he learnt that Louis had died in far-away seas.
He was now alone.[34] There were no more friendly voices; all that he
heard was a hideous duet between loneliness and weariness, sung