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It is hard to grasp today that the first performance of the “Damnation of Faust” at the Paris Opéra Comique (December 6, 1846) was the most heart-breaking fiasco of Berlioz’ life. It was not a question of violent opposition (if only it had been!) but of abysmal, devastating indifference. Only a scattering of friends occupied the first rows of the Salle Favart, with further back a handful of cynical faces. Otherwise an inhuman emptiness sat enthroned in the gaping theatre (the comic journal, Charivari, sniggered that if the Song of the Rat went unnoticed it was because there was not so much as a cat in the house!). From the outset Berlioz knew himself ruined, materially and spiritually. It was less the few remaining francs saved on his travels which mattered than the irreparable hurt done the morale of the afflicted man. “Nothing in my artistic career wounded me more deeply than this unexpected indifference”, he was to write in his Memoirs—lapsing, for once, into pitiful understatement! Not till 1877 was “The Damnation of Faust” revived in Paris, by which time the composer had been dead eight years.
Although Berlioz recouped some of his financial losses from the “Faust” misadventure when he went to Russia the following year he was the plaything of destiny once again when, late in 1847, he accepted an invitation from Louis Antoine Jullien to go to London and conduct opera at the Drury Lane Theatre, of which Jullien was then the manager. This spectacular French adventurer and charlatan, who speculated ruinously, went to jail for debt and died in a lunatic asylum, failed shortly after Berlioz suffered himself to be inveigled into what he thought would be a six years’ engagement; and the composer, after giving a few concerts of his own music, found himself back in Paris by July, 1848. But England saw him again in 1851-52, when the New Philharmonic Society of London secured him as conductor, and in 1855 when he occupied the same post—not to mention a visit two years earlier when he was lured across the Channel to witness a Covent Garden representation of his first opera, “Benvenuto Cellini”. This turned out almost as distressingly as had, in Paris, “The Damnation of Faust”.
It is one of the real misfortunes of musical history that Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner never became to each other the kinsmen and spiritual brothers they should have been. Some unhappy flaw in their respective natures always thwarted a consummation which, one feels, fate should have preordained. Or some barrier sprang up between them precisely at the moment they should best have complemented each other. They had, in the larger sense, the same ideals, the same luminous visions, the same majestic aims, the same reluctance to palter and to compromise. They were both tortured by nerves and exacerbated by futile suspicions and jealousies. Yet each had the true measure of the other’s importance, whether admitted or not. Prejudices and preconceptions, sometimes artificially fostered, if not fed by envy or rankling disappointment had a way of cropping up to blind them as soon as they gave promise of seeing eye to eye. Wagner was the stronger of the two, not only as to creative power but in toughness of fibre. But if they were not equally matched, the differences and asperities of the one fitted perfectly into the natural flaws and crudities of the other, as Wagner himself once took occasion to point out.
Berlioz appears to have recognized in Wagner, much as he may have resented it, a force of the future which sooner or later must challenge him. All the same, it is wrong to imagine that Wagner underrated his French rival, however he discerned the weaknesses of his work. His appreciation of the artist Berlioz was broader and more fundamental than the appreciation of Berlioz for him, which was so often soured by jealousy and blinded by bias. Wagner was incontestably sincere when he wrote: “We must honor Berlioz as the true renewer of modern music”. Too few people are familiar with that extraordinary episode at Bayreuth, long after the Frenchman’s death when the ageing Wagner flew into a towering rage on hearing the still youthful Felix Mottl criticise some detail of a Berlioz work. “When a master like Berlioz writes something you are too shallow to grasp your duty is to accept it without question or murmur!” he had screamed at his astonished disciple.
Taken in the last year of his life (1869)
Only once did the pair draw close enough to justify the belief that they might have developed, under more hospitable circumstances, a lasting friendship. This was in 1855, when the two men, in the depths of discouragement, met in London whither Wagner had come to conduct the Old Philharmonic. The improved relations were only temporary. The creator of “Tristan” appreciated that the jealous Marie Recio stood in the way of any lasting rapprochement. And he confided to Liszt that “a malicious wife can ruin a brilliant man ... and bring out the worst aspects of his character; indeed, I have sometimes to wonder if God would not have done better to have left women out of the scheme of creation”. In 1861, at the “Tannhäuser” fiasco at the Paris Opéra, Berlioz played a part that reflects eternal discredit on his memory, even if the shabby treatment he so often endured at the hands of his countrymen could account for his spitefulness.
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The domestic situation of Berlioz had hopelessly deteriorated. Harriet, lame, coarse, shrewish had lost the last vestiges of her once admired beauty and talent. She was in due course to suffer paralytic strokes and then to become bedridden. Her son, Louis, having grown to young manhood, became an “aspirant-marinier” at Le Havre and decided to follow the sea, inheriting an early but unfulfilled ambition of his father. A true sailor he had a wife in every port and Hector, who was aware of the wanderer’s inclinations, sometimes longed to meet those grandchildren of his he knew lived scattered through the hemispheres. Now and then Louis would return briefly to Paris and look in on his wretched mother at her little house on the hill of Montmartre. Occasionally he would seek out his father at his domicile near the Place Pigalle—though only when Marie Recio was out! The moment he heard her footsteps in the hall he would flee. He could not pardon his father and he said so unmistakably. So did others! To all reproaches the unhappy composer had only one helpless answer: “What would you? I love her.”