Famous composers and their works, Vol. 3

by Unknown

The year 1842 was an important date in Berlioz’s career. From that time his life was a divided one. Misunderstood in his own country, disheartened by his unsuccessful attempts to win the heart of the great public, inconsolable for the failure of Benvenuto which closed to him forever the doors of the Academy of Music, he resolved to undertake an artistic tour through Europe, and began with Belgium in the latter part of the year 1842. He met with rather more success there than in France, though he was still the subject of heated discussion. He took with him a decidedly mediocre singer, Mademoiselle Martin Recio, who had made a failure at the Opéra, and had managed to attach herself to him. He married her later, soon after the death of Miss Smithson, from whom he had been separated; but he was no happier in his second marriage than in his first; his first wife drank, his second made unjustifiable pretensions as a singer, which always exasperated him. After this little excursion to Belgium, Berlioz determined to try his fortune in Germany, where already some of his works had found their way; from this time onward, his life was nothing more than a series of journeys through France and foreign countries. His first grand tour was through northern Germany. At Leipsic he saw Mendelssohn, whom he met on the best of terms, forgetting all about their youthful quarrels; at Dresden he inspired an equal devotion on the part of Richard Wagner, who received him as a brother and treated him as a master; at Berlin he was no less warmly welcomed by Meyerbeer, who recruited the necessary artists for him and enabled him to direct a part of his Requiem.

On his return to Paris he organized, first, a monster festival at the Exposition of the Products of Industry, in August, 1844, then four grand concerts at the Circus of the Champs Elysées, early in 1845; but these gigantic concerts which it had always been his aim to direct, brought him no profit. Not discouraged by this, however, he gave grand concerts at Marseilles and at Lyons, the modest success of which was due partly to curiosity, partly to surprise. After that he went to Austria, Bohemia and Hungary; this tour was scarcely finished when he rushed off to Lille to organize a grand festival there on the occasion of the inauguration of the Northern railroad. Finally in the summer of 1846 he returned to Paris, and after having given a magnificent performance of his Requiem in the Saint Eustache church, he decided to bring before the public his most important work, The Damnation of Faust. The first performance took place on December 6, before a small audience. The solos were sung by Roger, Hermann, Leon, Henri, and Madame Duflôt-Maillard, who had no better comprehension of the music than the public. The second performance was given on Sunday the 20th, before an equally small house, with a tenor who had to omit the Invocation to Nature. This convinced Berlioz that he was still far from having conquered his own country. He departed for Russia, deeply wounded by the indifference of his countrymen.

Some of his Paris friends had clubbed together to furnish him the means to go to St. Petersburg, whence he had received some brilliant offers. He achieved the greatest success there, with musicians as well as with the public, and the fact of his having formerly befriended Glinka at Paris had its effect in enlisting sympathies for him in Russia. On his way back he stopped at Berlin, where the Damnation of Faust was given with little enough appreciation, but where he received recognition from the sovereign and the princess of Prussia. When he got back again to Paris, crowned with laurels, and with money enough to settle all the debts incurred by the performance of the Damnation of Faust at the Opéra Comique, he worked hard to get the appointment at the Opéra of Duponchel and Roqueplan, who were talking of an immediate revival of Benvenuto Cellini, of mounting la Nonne sanglante, etc. Berlioz succeeded in getting them nominated directors, through the aid of the Bertins, but they no sooner had the official notice in their pockets than they utterly ignored Berlioz. The latter understood that he was holding a restraint upon them, and since, as he said, he was accustomed to this sort of proceedings, he took himself off to London in order to rid them of his troublesome presence. The affair of the Drury Lane concerts, unwisely entered into with the eccentric conductor Julien, terminated in bankruptcy, and the Revolution which followed in 1848 would have left Berlioz without a sou had not Victor Hugo and Louis Blanc obtained for the sworn disciple of the romantic school the humble post of librarian at the Conservatoire.

In August, 1848, Berlioz experienced one of the keenest sorrows of his life in the loss of his father. He went to Grenoble to attend his father’s funeral, and in his Mémoires he gives a most touching account of the sad visit. It was about this time that his little Chœur de Bergers was given under the pseudonym of Pierce Ducré, at the concerts of the Philharmonic Society, Saint Cecilia hall, Chaussée d’Antin. In 1852 his Benvenuto was given with great success at Weimar under the fervent direction of Liszt, but the next year the same opera utterly failed in London, where the Italians, said Berlioz, conspired to ruin it. By “Italians” Berlioz meant the orchestral conductor Costa and his party. Berlioz had accepted the preceding year the leadership of the New Philharmonic, and had made by his success, and attacks, a bitter enemy of the leader of the old Philharmonic Society.

HECTOR BERLIOZ.
Reproduced from a portrait engraved after a painting by M. Signol—Rome—1831.

After the Empire had been restored in France, Berlioz would have liked to see reëstablished in his own favor the high position which his master Lesueur had occupied under the first Empire; but all that he obtained was the privilege of performing a Te Deum, which he was holding in reserve for the coronation of the new sovereign, and it was Auber who was appointed master of music of the Imperial Chapel. In December, 1854, his sacred trilogy of the Childhood of Christ, completed and remodelled, was given with great success, and if it was performed but twice, it was only because Berlioz,—he had taken great care to announce it in advance,—was on the point of departing for Gotha, Weimar, and Brussels, where there was great eagerness to hear this new work. He returned to Paris the following March, and on the evening of April 30, 1855, the day preceding the Universal Exposition, he gave in Saint Eustache church the first performance of his grand Te Deum for three choruses, orchestra and organ. Afterwards when it became a question of engraving it, Berlioz was able to see how greatly he was admired in foreign lands, for the first subscribers were the kings of Hanover, Saxony, Prussia, the emperor of Russia, the king of Belgium and the queen of England. The following year he published a final and much enlarged edition of his excellent Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, originally brought out in 1844; he dedicated this work to the king of Prussia. On the 21st of June, 1856, after four tours de scrutin, he was nominated member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, replacing Adolphe Adam, who had refused to vote for him two years before and had helped to form the majority in favor of Clapisson. The following years were spent by Berlioz in organizing concerts at Weimar and in England, and above all in the composition of the great work on which he built his supreme hope of success in France, his tragedy of Les Troyens. Since 1856 he had been invited every year to Baden by Bénazet, contractor for the gaming tables, to organize grand concerts for the benefit of the visitors. Thus when the king of Baden, as Bénazet was called, concluded to build a new entertainment hall, it occurred to him at once that it would be a fine idea to get Berlioz to write something for its inauguration, and the latter, from the first mention of the subject, felt a reawakening of the desire which had been haunting him for thirty years, to write a comic opera, at once sentimental and gay, on certain scenes arranged by himself after Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing. He acquitted himself of this agreeable task by fits and starts; the performance of the work at Baden took place three days sooner than he hoped, and the success was great enough with that cosmopolitan audience, in which the French predominated, to find an immediate echo at Paris. The following year Mesdames Viardot and Vendenheuvel-Duprez sang the delicious nocturne which closes the first act. For an instant Berlioz indulged in the hope that they were going to play his bit of comedy at the Opéra Comique, and in this fond hope he wrote two more things and had them engraved; but he was soon obliged to recognize that it would be impossible with such a director as Emile Perrin, and so thought no more about it. Besides, he was entirely occupied with his dear Troyens and the production of this beloved work absorbed his every thought. In 1857 he was all in the heat of the composition; he talked about his antique tragedy to M. Bennett, to Auguste Morel, to Hans von Bülow; in default of the music he read his poem at the salons, sometimes at M. Edouard Bertin’s house, sometimes at his own, and everywhere he received the warmest congratulations. At a soirée at the Tuileries, the Empress spoke to him at length in regard to it, and immediately he proposed to read his poems to the sovereigns if the Emperor could find an hour to give him, but not until three acts were completed, so that they might order the immediate study of it at the Opéra. Alas, the Emperor, unlearned in matters of music, did not respond favorably to Berlioz’s demands; he took no notice of his poem, and did not give the longed-for order to mount Les Troyens at the Opéra. But while Berlioz was chafing with impatience at seeing La Favorite and Lucie, translated by Alphonse Royer, played over and over again, and Halévy’s La Magicienne and Félicien David’s Herculanum pass him by, the Emperor, through the solicitations of the princess Metternich, opened the doors of the Opéra to Richard Wagner, and decreed that his Tannhäuser should be given with great pomp and magnificence.

The blow was a cruel one, and Berlioz, beside himself with rage and disappointment, attacked this unexpected rival and his opera with a fury that knew no bounds. He did not understand, unhappy man, that his cause was closely allied to that of Richard Wagner; the public, influenced by such critics as Scudo, Jouvin, Lasalle, Azevedo and Chadeuil, was equally hard on both of them and classed them together as a couple of dangerous madmen; no distinction was made between the two. The fall of Tannhäuser, towards which Berlioz had worked with all his energies, resulted in closing to him the stage of the Opéra, and it also assured in advance the unpopularity of les Troyens with the public ready to extol or condemn the two innovators without discrimination. Moreover he saw Gounod, Gevaert and many others gain access to the Opéra in preference to himself. At last quite worn out with disappointment, Berlioz decided to accept the offers of M. Carvalho. This manager had just reopened the Théâtre-Lyrique and wished to make a great hit in order to obtain from the government a subsidy of a hundred thousand francs.

But it was no longer a question of playing the whole of les Troyens at the Théâtre-Lyrique; they would content themselves now with playing the first three acts, subdivided into five, under the title of les Troyens à Carthage. The first part of the work Berlioz had published as la Prise de Troie, but he never heard it performed. Les Troyens à Carthage was given at the Théâtre-Lyrique Nov. 4, 1863, and scored a failure, although nothing particularly hostile or unpleasant occurred on the opening night; the poor author even entertained faint hopes of future success. It was the cumulative effect of the scornful articles in nearly all the large newspapers, the ridicule of the smaller press and of the theatrical parodies, above all the absolute indifference of the public, leaving his cherished work to drag itself miserably through a score of performances, that disheartened Berlioz and killed him. His whole life, indeed, had hung upon this last hope of success, and with the conviction of genius, at the close of the general rehearsal he had exclaimed with tears coursing freely down his cheeks, “It is beautiful, it is sublime!” He retired to his house and lived there, taciturn, desolate, seeing only a few chosen friends who tried to console him, and cared for like a child by his mother-in-law; he had buried his second wife (June, 1862) by the side of the first, in Montmartre cemetery.

Thanks to the income from his compositions he was able to give up his post of musical critic of the Débats, which had become insupportable to him, and was made an officer of the Legion of Honor. He had been a chevalier for twenty-four years, having been appointed by M. de Gasparin in 1839, six months before the performance of Romeo and Juliet. At Paris he found some consolation in listening to selections from the Childhood of Christ at the concerts of the Conservatoire, and in seeing people give serious attention to his compositions and sometimes applaud them heartily, at the Popular Concerts recently founded by Pasdeloup. Only two or three times did he consent to go out of France; once to direct the Damnation of Faust at Vienna, whither he was invited by Herbeck, court capellmeister; once to conduct the Harold Symphony at Cologne by the invitation of Ferdinand Hiller; finally to St. Petersburg at the very urgent solicitations of the grand duchess Helen, an enthusiastic admirer of his works. But on the eve of his departure he learned of the death of his son Louis in a distant country. It was a terrible blow to Berlioz, who was devotedly attached to this son, a frail, dissipated youth, always discontented with his lot, and little more than a source of anxiety to his father. He set out for St. Petersburg with a broken heart, and though overwhelmed with successes and triumphs, entertained and received like a friend by his young admirer, the grand duchess, he felt his health failing and his strength leaving him day by day. On his return he went south, thinking that the Mediterranean might have a beneficial effect upon his health and spirits; but twice while walking on the beach, once at Monaco, afterwards at Nice, he was attacked with vertigo, and fell fainting to the ground. He returned to Paris, and at the end of two months believed himself cured of these fainting spells, but the nervous trouble increased daily. He still had desire and strength enough left to drag himself to Grenoble in August, 1868, to attend a musical solemnity at which he was made honorary president by his colleagues, who were proud of him at last. This was the end; on Monday morning the 8th of March, 1869, Hector Berlioz quietly and painlessly breathed his last.