To trace the impact of Berlioz on Wagner, it would seem appropriate to start with the scores the German composer was drafting when he first encountered the Frenchman’s music in the winter of 1839—the overture on Goethe’s Faust (completed on January 12, 1840), and the operas Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer. Of these much-written-about works let me set down here only some suggestions I have not seen elsewhere. The overture to Rienzi begins quite remarkably with a single note from the trumpet, the fifth of the triad on D that is the tonic of the work as a whole. The only prior instances of this surprising procedure that I am aware of occur in Weber’s Oberon Overture (1826), and in Berlioz’s own Waverley Overture (1828), the latter having been published in Paris in the autumn of 1839, which probably came to Wagner’s notice when he was working on Rienzi. The decorative turns with which the strings punctuate the presentation by wind and brass of the Rienzi Overture’s principal D-major theme (bars 50–65) might furthermore have been suggested by the passage in the first movement of Harold en Italie (given contemporaneously in Paris, on February 6, 1840) in which Berlioz’s orchestra for the first time takes up the soloist’s idée fixe (in bars 73–84).
It is for employing such
idées fixes (tranquilly in
Harold,
obsessively in the
Fantastique) that Berlioz was already celebrated, in 1839, and some have proposed that therein lie the origins of the emblem of Wagner’s larger aesthetic experiment, the leitmotif. But the French composer was even more satisfied, I think, by the deployment, at moments of dramatic intensity, of a combination of two earlier, vital tunes, which he troubled to label as a
réunion. In the finale of the
Fantastique, for example, we see the explicit notation “Dies Irae et Ronde du Sabbat
ensemble.” (Reinhold Brinkmann heard this as an ironic take on the union of “Freude schöner Götterfunken” and “Seid umschlungen Millionen” in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth!)
1 Interview of Brinkmann by Max Neffeler (2001) at https://www.beckmesser.info/rein- hold-brinkmann-dem-ton-der epoche-nachgehoert/. In the finale of the second tableau of
Benvenuto Cellini,
we hear three separately announced ideas openly and artfully combined in the following delightful episode;
2 NBE 1b:557. and in the second movement of
Roméo et Juliette (at bar 226), we see the principal melody of the
Fête chez Capulet combined with an earlier conspicuous melody of leisurely pace into an unabashed “réunion des deux thèmes, du Larghetto et de l’Allegro.”
For act 5 of
Rienzi,
Wagner sketched a similar
réunion des thèmes that consisted of the melody of Rienzi’s Prayer, at the opening of the first scene (used in the overture) and a version of the opening melody of the subsequent duet between the title character and his sister, Irene. Wagner abandoned the sketch, as John Deathridge has shown, because he could not bring these tunes into harmonious unity.
3 Deathridge, Wagner’s Rienzi, 134–135. He did manage an effective superimposition in act 3 of
Der fliegende Holländer,
when the Norwegian sailors attempt to drown in sound the Dutchman’s motley crew. By thus transforming an exercise in academic counterpoint into a moment of dramatic expression, was Wagner paying homage to Berlioz? The Frenchman was famously antipathetic to schoolmasterish rules, yet filled his scores with fugue and fugato. Wagner, too, later wrestled overtly with the question of musical law and liberty in what became
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.For many observers, Berlioz’s most obvious role as a model for Wagner was as a student of novel and expressive instrumental sonorities and (in Berlioz’s words) as a “player of the orchestra.” The one hundred musicians of Berlioz’s
Roméo et Juliette ensemble, in 1839, with its eight harps, off-stage choirs, and other spatial effects, could not have failed to impress Wagner, whose previous experience was with orchestral groupings of classical proportion. The expansion of the orchestra that we witness in
Der fliegende Holländer was,
for Eduard Hanslick, an imitation of “the gaudiest achievements of Meyerbeer and Berlioz.”
4 Quoted in Wagner, Der fliegende Holländer, vii. But for Richard Strauss, revising the
Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes and in a position to know,
Berlioz’s orchestration was “full of ingenious visions […] whose realization by Richard Wagner is obvious to every connoisseur.”
Interrogating Berlioz’s musical “influence” upon Wagner is to be recommended as non-addictive and potentially edifying, with any results being absolutely unprovable. Seeking Berlioz’s literary influence upon Wagner is equally entertaining and unverifiable. In Wagner’s first fictional essay, Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven, which initially appeared in French as Une Visite à Beethoven in November and December of 1840, readers of Maurice Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette musicale would probably have recognized the explicitly Berliozian resonance of Wagner’s subtitle—Épisode de la vie d’un musicien allemand—echoing that of Berlioz’s first symphony, Épisode de la vie d’un artiste. In Ein Ende in Paris, which initially appeared in French as Un Musicien étranger à Paris, readers might also have heard a Berliozian resonance in the protagonist’s principled refusal to write music for money—something for which Wagner explicitly complimented Berlioz in his nonfictional report from Paris for the Dresden Abendzeitung of May 5, 1841.