Early Impressions

Three years later, Wagner arrived in Paris, in the autumn of 1839, with letters of introduction provided by Meyerbeer to some of the city’s musical luminaries. He seems first to have encountered Berlioz at Maurice Schlesinger’s shop, at 97, rue de Richelieu, a meeting place and gossip mill for musicians both foreign and domestic,1 Wagner, My Life, 191. and just up the road from the Paris branch of the Brockhaus bookstore, at 60, rue de Richelieu, where the proprietor was Eduard Avenarius—codirector, with Friedrich and Heinrich Brockhaus, of the printing house (known, especially in Leipzig, for its biographies and encyclopedias), and fiancé, in 1839, of Wagner’s sister Cäcilie. Near the end of that year, Wagner attended one of the three successive performances of Berlioz’s new dramatic symphony—probably the first, because his name figures on the list of invités,2 Tiersot, La Musique aux temps romantiques, 174. and because he was at the time frequently in the company of Meyerbeer, who did attend the première, on November 24, 1839.3 Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, 3:209. On page 64 of the autograph score of Roméo et Juliette, there is a note in Berlioz’s hand that reads: “Mr Wagner / rue Montmartre.” Some have been tempted to suppose that Richard Wagner made himself known to Berlioz at a time when the composer, who conducted from the manuscript, had this score in hand. But the reference is almost certainly to Jean Wagner, a well-regarded clockmaker whose shop was in fact located in the rue Montmartre, and whose talents included the making of superior métronomes de Maelzel, as they were called, no doubt authorized to do so by the inventor of the device, who himself had lived in Paris at the beginning of the Restoration.

Roméo et Juliette, to date the greatest success of his career, was the first work of Berlioz’s to be heard by Richard Wagner. The German composer tells us that he experienced an epiphany in Paris on hearing the first three movements of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as rehearsed by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire during the first two weeks of December 1839—perhaps on the 7th, when the celebrated conductor, François-Antoine Habeneck, rehearsed something of Wagner’s as well. But it is likely that that revelation was enhanced by hearing, at almost precisely the same time, Berlioz’s own take on Beethoven’s choral symphony, Roméo et Juliette.

Further works by Berlioz that were performed during Wagner’s stay in Paris from 1839 to 1842 include the Symphonie fantastique, Harold en Italie, the overture and Teresa’s cavatina from Benvenuto Cellini, excerpts from the Requiem, the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, Sara la baigneuse, Le Cinq Mai, the recitatives for Der Freischütz along with the orchestration (for the ballet) of Weber’s L’Invitation à la valse, and the Rêverie et Caprice. In his three years in the French capital, therefore, Wagner came into possession of almost the entirely of the repertory of Berlioz’s most fertile decade. When he left the city, on April 7, 1842, it was to prepare performances of the two operas he had miraculously managed to complete during what had been a period of such urgent financial need that he had had to seek meager employment as a chorister in a popular theater on the boulevard: “I came off worse than Berlioz when he was in a similar predicament,” he later told Edward Dannreuther, possibly parroting the anecdote that Berlioz had recounted in, among other places, chapter 12 of the Mémoires. “The conductor who tested my abilities discovered that I could not sing at all, and pronounced me a hopeless case all around.”4 Dannreuther, “Wagner,” 4:351. Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer soon secured for their composer a brilliant reputation of his own, however, and a secure position as Kapellmeister, in Dresden, at the court of the King of Saxony.

By curious coincidence, Berlioz, too, departed from Paris in 1842, in an official capacity, to investigate and report upon musical conditions in Germany, with assistance from the Ministry of the Interior, and in an unofficial capacity, to seek acceptance for his own brand of dramatically expressive instrumental music, to establish his reputation abroad, and thereby to improve his standing at home. With Berlioz’s long-held view of the advantages of princely support of the arts in mind—we have seen it in the document discussed in chapter 8—we may better read the specific account he gives of his visit to Dresden, where he spent twelve days, from February 7 to February 19, 1843, where he found resources richer than those available in many of the other German towns, where he conducted eight rehearsals and two concerts of his own music, and, finally, where he encountered Richard Wagner—now considerably less vulnerable than he was during his years in Paris. On the 7th, Berlioz heard the fourth Dresden performance of Der fliegende Holländer, under Wagner’s direction; on the 19th, he heard Rienzi, under the baton of the senior Kapellmeister, Carl Gottlieb Reissiger. In fact, what he heard was Rienzi’s Fall—the last three acts of the original opera—which, like Les Troyens at a later date, was considered too long for one evening’s entertainment and had thus to be hewn in half.

Berlioz’s report from Dresden first appeared as an open letter in the Journal des débats of September 12, 1843: the public recipient was Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, the German violinist whom Berlioz had known in Paris for some ten years. This letter was soon incorporated into the Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie (1844), with small changes, and was later entered into the Mémoires. In it, Berlioz speaks of Wagner in some detail, for the latter’s first official duties had been to assist the visiting Frenchman with his rehearsals—something Wagner did, Berlioz tells us, “with enthusiasm and excellent good will.” Berlioz describes Wagner’s pleasure and “glowing satisfaction” when he was formally installed as associate master of the chapel, and goes on to speak of his work:

More importantly, in his report from Dresden, Berlioz underscores and praises the action of Friedrich August II, King of Saxony from 1836 to 1854, to whom he returns in the following paragraph: “We must honor the enlightened King who, by according [Wagner] his active and total protection, has effectively saved a young artist of rare talents.” Wagner himself, aware of the possible servitude to which such a position might condemn him, and alert to the psychological distance between campestral Dresden and cosmopolitan Paris, had at first been fearful of accepting it. But three months after having done so, he would write proudly to his friend Samuel Lehrs, in Paris, that “I now have tenure for life with a handsome salary [of 1,500 thalers, or roughly 5,550 francs per annum] that will most probably continue to rise, and I enjoy a sphere of influence such as has been granted to few men.”6 Wagner, Selected Letters, 107. Spencer gives the salary in “Wagner Behind Bars?,” Wagner 19 (1998): 95. In the same letter (of April 7, 1843), Wagner speaks of King Friedrich August as “an honest man with none of the usual airs and graces, but totally sincere in his approach to everything,” and as taking in his new Kapellmeister “a genuine and good-natured delight.” Thus, when he likened Friedrich August’s promotion of Wagner to Louis XIV’s promotion of the celebrated seaman Jean Bart—whose disarmingly simple manners had so charmed the King and his court at Versailles that he was able to use without offense the now celebrated phrase, “Sire, vous avez bien fait”—Berlioz was on point. In fact Berlioz enjoyed likening himself to Jean Bart: he did so, for example, when he invited the Duc d’Orléans to his concert of November 25, 1838,7 BnF, Berlioz, Lettres autographes (a draft of the invitation, on the verso of a draft of the program of the concert of November 25, 1838). and he did so again, in 1853, when he imagined what he would have said to Napoléon I had the Emperor required a command performance of the Requiem—which is, he told Franz Liszt on February 23, what “Jean Bart replied to Louis XIV: ‘Sire, vous avez raison.’” Berlioz’s leitmotivic use of the saying is a sign of his awareness, I think, that in 1845 a cantata in honor of Jean Bart was commissioned for the inauguration of the statue in the Atlantic city of Dunkerque that to this day speaks of Jean Bart as its “glorious son.” More broadly, it is a sign of his lifelong respect and desire for enlightened aristocratic patronage.

It may seem odd that Berlioz’s writerly account of his encounter with Wagner is nowhere prefigured in his private correspondence immediately contemporary with the visit to Dresden. But he was busy with rehearsals in Leipzig and even found it necessary to take the morning train to Dresden (on February 2, 1843), to make concert arrangements there, and to return to Leipzig on the same afternoon: “Puissance des chemins de fer!” he exclaimed to his father on March 14, impressed as he was by the new rail line that, since 1839, spanned those now diminished seventy miles. He was also under surveillance by his traveling companion, Marie Recio, with whom relations were mercurial and public appearances dicey. Correspondence of the period is in any event somewhat cautious and restrained.

Eleven years later, Berlioz flirted seriously with an invitation to become Kapellmeister in “Wagner’s” Dresden, in the spring of 1854, when he gave four concerts there and planned a revival of Benvenuto Cellini. The opera was not performed, however, and Berlioz did not become master of the chapel. Wagner’s senior Kapellmeister was still in office, and Berlioz—whose high regard for Reissiger stands in stark contrast to Wagner’s carping estimation of the talent of his superior officer—presumably wished neither to encroach upon Reissiger’s territory nor to accept a position of subordinate status. Furthermore, Dresden was still a relatively undeveloped backwater, despite Berlioz’s assertions of the excellence of its musical establishment, and a sufficiently generous offer may not have materialized after the accidental death of the King: like Berlioz’s earlier patron, the Duc d’Orléans, Friedrich August II, too, was killed in a fall from a carriage, on August 9, 1854. For Berlioz, this was “a fatality worthy of the ancients.”8 Berlioz to Hans von Bülow, September 1, 1854 (CG 4:574).

There is no indication that the composer pursued the matter with Johann, Friedrich August’s brother, who now became King of Saxony. Marie Recio, Berlioz’s wife since October 19, 1854, and her mother, the Frenchified Spaniard whose company Berlioz would later come to appreciate, were probably little inclined to expatriate. And Berlioz’s election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts two years later made the question of any such emigration academic, for regular members of the Institut de France had to reside in France. Still, because of his attraction to monarchical authority, it may well be that Berlioz, in the eighteen-fifties, was temperamentally more suited to become a court musician than had been Wagner, in the eighteen-forties. How odd that Wagner, in the eighteen-sixties, should become the God-sent “child of Heaven” to the twenty-year-old King of Bavaria.9 Eger, “The Patronage of King Ludwig II,” in Müller, Wagner Handbook, 318.