There was talk in governmental circles of “purchasing” the Requiem, of a grand decoration, of a professorship at the Conservatoire, of a generous pension from the Beaux Arts ministry. Nothing came of all these plans. As far as the Conservatoire post was concerned Berlioz was rejected as teacher of harmony at that institution on the ground that he could not play piano—which was as true as it was irrelevant. But a far greater and more fateful disappointment lay ahead. Early in 1838 his mother—who had cursed him—died at La Côte-Saint-André. Her curse did not perish with her; in fact, it smote him soon afterwards when his lyric drama, “Benvenuto Cellini”, failed grievously at the Opéra, where after long and torturing efforts he at length managed to have it performed. Not even today can it be said to have gained anything like a permanent foothold on the stage.
As time went on Hector tried to master his inhospitable fate in the operatic theatre by various compromises and subterfuges. He sought to create a “dramatic symphony”, based on “Romeo and Juliet”, and neither outright drama nor outright symphony—which accounts for its infrequent performance, despite the extraordinary beauty of some of its music. He wrote a “concert opera” which is, in effect, a cantata masquerading as an opera and vice-versa. “La Damnation de Faust”, one of the three most essential capturings in music of Goethe’s “Faust” drama, was at its first hearing in 1846 possibly the most distressful defeats he ever suffered at the hands of his countrymen. Not until decades after his death did he enjoy a kind of posthumous revenge when Raoul Gunsbourg, in Monte Carlo, fashioned a stage production which is now one of the mainstays of the Paris Opéra. A destiny in some respects even more deplorable was that of his music drama, “Les Troyens”, which he was never to hear in its completeness. The one theatre work of Berlioz to enjoy something like an uncontested triumph at its launching was his two-act opera comique, “Béatrice et Bénédict”, for which Shakespeare provided the original incentive. As for “Roméo et Juliette”, its high points are found in two movements—the rapturous love scene, which includes the most enamoring melodic ideas Berlioz ever conceived, and the unparagoned Queen Mab scherzo, embodying the composer’s instrumental fancy at its most subtle and ravishing—even if Parisian criticism of the time could see no more in it than “a little noise like that of an ill-greased syringe”!
That long scheduled visit to Germany continued to be deferred. Meantime Berlioz had been appointed assistant librarian at the Paris Conservatoire, a small distinction, to be sure; but offering at any rate a few additional francs. A more ponderable achievement was the composition for band of a three movement “Symphonie funèbre et triomphale”, planned for performance in the open air in memory of those fallen in the Revolution of 1830. The “Funeral and Triumphal Symphony” was one of the first compositions of Berlioz which Wagner heard when he arrived in Paris in 1840. Wagner was struck by the nobility of the work, ranked it among the loftiest achievements of its composer and retained an undissembled admiration for it all his days. Berlioz had reason to believe that, after this official labor, he might be called to step into the shoes of Cherubini at the Conservatoire when that worthy went to his reward in 1842. But the choice fell upon Georges Onslow and Hector, realizing that if he was ever to obtain in Paris the distinction to which he felt himself entitled, he would have to enhance his French reputation by properly publicized successes abroad. So he began by giving several concerts in Brussels, the second of which was destined to be important—less so for musical reasons than because of domestic entanglements it initiated.
Knowing Harriet’s jealousy Hector seems to have been strangely incautious about keeping secret the identity of his “traveling companion”. It did not take his alternately maudlin and aciduous Irish wife many days to find out from the papers that a certain Marie Recio was the snake in the grass. The Recio was a second rate singer, whose real name was Marie Genevieve Martin. Hector had met her in 1841. We are told that she rekindled in his heart those romantic emotions the now slatternly and alcoholic Harriet could no longer feed. Marie’s mother encouraged the liaison because she realized the power Berlioz had come to be in the journalistic field. He had been so imprudent as to impose her on one operatic management and the game had turned out badly. Before long poor Hector found himself as luckless in his second love affair as he had been in his first.
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The various tours which Hector undertook in Germany brought him artistic honors and material successes of which in France he never dreamed. Among average audiences he discovered a seriousness and a degree of taste such as were limited to a few circles at home. He refashioned old musical friendships and cultivated new ones. Mendelssohn met him in Leipzig and the pair continued the old artistic discussions and arguments as they had years before in Rome. Felix “was charming, fascinating, ceaselessly obliging and determined to be a guarantee for his French colleague’s success”. The two exchanged batons to symbolize their professional amity. Felix praised some of Hector’s songs but avoided saying a word about his symphonies, overtures or the Requiem (actually, he detested them!) Berlioz saw Robert and Clara Schumann, the former appeared “wholly electrified by the Offertory of my Requiem”. The Schumanns were hospitality itself, even if Clara sometimes found the Frenchman “cold, indifferent, morose” and “not the kind of artist I like”. Robert, however, “feels a sympathy for him which I cannot explain”. Mendelssohn privately confessed that he felt like washing his hands after he had been through a Berlioz score. In Dresden there was Richard Wagner, whose “Rienzi” and “Flying Dutchman” Hector listened to with interest and who turned himself inside out to assist the extraordinary visitor in training orchestra and chorus for his concert in that city. One thing astonished Berlioz and grew to be something of a fly in the German ointment: that worship of Bach with which he was surrounded! “People do not believe that this divinity can ever be subjected to question”, he sighed. “Heresy on the subject is forbidden; Bach is Bach, just as God is God!”
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On these travels, which went on intermittently for years, Hector visited not only Germany but also Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Russia. He went to Russia in 1847 and later. There he was greeted like a conqueror and more than any other nation that country proved, materially, a gold mine to him. A pity that the harsh climate of places like St. Petersburg was, in the end, to try him so sorely! For whenever he went there he was literally overwhelmed with honors, decorations, costly gifts. In short, whenever neglect or disappointment became unbearable he could turn to Russia for at least temporary alleviation.
In Vienna (1845) he found much to delight him. To be sure he was often painfully struck by many things, such as the lamentable “ignorance prevailing with respect to the works of Gluck”. He was in the habit of asking musicians if they knew “Alceste” or “Iphigenia” and invariably he received the answer: “They are never performed in Vienna; we do not know them”. Whereupon his mental reaction would be: “But, you wretched creatures, whether they are performed or not, you ought to know them by heart!” On the other hand, he heard numbers of remarkable artists and admits he “would have to write a book to do justice to each and to catalogue all the musical wealth of Vienna in detail”. He received, naturally, the usual silver baton “inscribed with the titles of his works”. Also, a little present of a hundred ducats from the Emperor after one of his concerts in the Redouten Saal; and, from the same exalted source, the message, conveyed by the Imperial master of ceremonies: “Tell Berlioz that I was greatly amused”!
Meanwhile the composer had been working by fits and starts on “The Damnation of Faust”. He wrote page after page of it at the most unbelievable times of day and night and in the unlikeliest places—on the Boulevard Poissonière, on a stone of the Boulevard du Temple, in the park at Enghien (when in a somnambulistic trance he had boarded a suburban train and it had simply deposited him there); at Lille, at Rouen, in Passau, in Prague, in Silesia; while walking, while eating, while traveling. When he left Vienna for Budapest he prepared to perform at his first Hungarian concert the Rakoczy March of which he had made what, in effect, has long been the standardized and most overpowering orchestration of all. This national melody invariably drove Magyar listeners into frenzies of patriotic enthusiasm (for that matter few audiences even now can hear it unstirred). And on the program piloted by Berlioz it led to such a wild demonstration that, as he directed it, the composer’s hair stood on end and he was seized for a few moments with a kind of nightmare terror. He thereupon introduced the march into the score of “The Damnation” and placed the opening scene of the Faust action in Hungary so as to motivate the presence in the score of the volcanic page.