SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
He presented himself three times
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.]
this was: He Presented Himself Three Times
go to next chapter: Captain Of A Merchant Vessel
