Chapter Nine
Berlioz and Wagner
Épisodes de la vie des artistes
Vivre!… mais vivre, pour moi, c’est souffrir!
—Berlioz, Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie
“Au grand et cher auteur de
Roméo et Juliette,
l’auteur reconnaissant de
Tristan et Isolde”—so reads the handsome dedication on the copy of the full score of
Tristan that Wagner sent to Berlioz,
1 The dedication may be seen online: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3252261/f9.item.r=Wagner%20Tristan. on January 21, 1860, with a brief and touching letter:
Cher Berlioz,
Je suis ravi de vous pouvoir offrir le premier exemplaire de mon Tristan.
Acceptez-le et gardez-le d’amitié pour moi.
À vous.
Richard Wagner
“I am delighted to be able to offer you the first copy of my
Tristan,” writes Wagner; “please accept the score as a token of my friendship.” Such attentiveness is a small indication, I think, that even as a mature composer nearing his forty-seventh birthday, Wagner continued to regard Berlioz, then fifty-six, as a senior and by no means conventionally benevolent colleague.
2 CG 6:111. In fact the gift was one of extraordinary generosity, both because this was indeed a first, and rare, pre-publication copy, sent by the publishers to Wagner only one week earlier, and because it was a costly item, whose list price of thirty-five thalers, equivalent to one hundred forty-four francs, was comparable at the time to the monthly income of many a professor, government functionary, itinerant musician. What led Wagner to bestow such bounty upon Berlioz? And why, for Wagner, was the Frenchman still the “grand and dear author of
Roméo et Juliette”
—the now more than twenty-year-old dramatic symphony of 1839?
It may be because French Wagnerianism flourished in the period immediately following Berlioz’s death—in remarkable counterpoint with French Germanophobia—that subsequent generations have tended to pair Berlioz and Wagner as they have Bach and Handel (who were born in the same year) and Haydn and Mozart (who reached compositional maturity in the same decade). But apart from their differing views of the world, which led the younger man regularly to promulgate aesthetic doctrines while the older man continued to eschew “theory,” the nature of the relations between the composer of Roméo et Juliette and the composer of Tristan und Isolde are best understood in light of the dissimilar landscapes of their youthful experiences and the different trajectories of their professional careers.