In the ensuing years, as Wagner developed from an extraordinary composer of romantic opera into the unparalleled creator of music drama, and from a wandering fugitive into the eventual “savior” of the Bavarian monarch, relations with Berlioz inevitably cooled. The Frenchman’s later years were clouded by ill health and ill fortune for
Les Troyens,
which ought to have crowned his career.
And yet when Berlioz died, on March 8, 1869, Wagner (who appears to have received the news on the 11th) felt compelled to memorialize the occasion. On March 14, 1869, Cosima noted in her diary that the obituaries they had read were embarrassed, or confused (“verlegen”). Possibly perusing a copy of the
Mémoires given to her by the French writer Édouard Schuré, an admirer of Berlioz and a great champion of Wagner, she wrote on April 7, 1869, that Wagner “is quite unable
now to write about Berlioz. He would have liked to do it, and the impact of such an essay would perhaps have been good, but nobody should expect it of him.”
1 Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 1:73, 83.Cosima’s emphasis on the word jetzt suggests that Wagner had begun but failed to realize a substantial necrology. Of this we have only what appears to be the prologue—undated, but presumably written in April 1869. It is a tortured piece of writing in the original German, and it is equally convoluted in William Ashton Ellis’s translation. I offer a paraphrase of the first, full-to-bursting sentence:
Even if, during his lifetime, a person has been discussed in generally negative terms, it is still our sacred duty, after his death, to speak about him in a positive manner. And yet, to ensure that posterity not be misled, we must also assume the distressing obligation of exposing as false some of the flattering images of the man, which he, himself, had done much to encourage.
2 Wagner, Entwürfe, Gedanken, Fragmente, 77–78. My rendering is indebted to those of my distinguished colleagues Hans Rudolf Vaget and Philipp Otto Naegele.This is followed by a straight-forward thought: Were the true worth of an artist easy to assess, the making of a proper judgment would be unproblematical. But the making of a proper judgment is especially difficult when the impact of an artist is dubious, or suspicious (“zweifelhaft”)—even when certain qualities of his work are beyond question (“unzweifelhaft”). Wagner underlines the tendency of posterity to inflate previous appraisals, and urges those who wish to behold what is beautiful and significant in purely human terms to make judgments without the constraints of any particular historical period. “We choose Hector Berlioz,” he writes, “to try to gain from his example the kind of disinterested judgment that transcends time and circumstance.”
Here ends the fragment. Was this in fact to be an obituary? Or, as one might gather from the “we choose” phraseology, was it to be a treatise on the philosophy of criticism? In either case, it is a prolegomenon to something conflicted and bittersweet. Wagner had always found “uneasiness,” “chaos,” “confusion,” and “mistakes” in the work of Berlioz, and yet now—as on September 8, 1852, when he told Liszt: “Glaub’ mir—ich
liebe Berlioz, mag er sich auch mißtrauisch und eigensinnig von mir entfernt halten: er
kennt mich nicht,
—aber
ich kenne
ihn” (“Believe me, I
love Berlioz, even though he distrustfully and obstinately refuses to come near me: he does not
know me, but
I know
him”)
3 Kloss, Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, 177; and Wagner, Selected Letters, 268. —now, in 1869, he was clearly drawn to the French composer. The modern translators whom I cite offer “like” for “liebe,” but I believe the exuberant German intended to say “love.” In May of that year, Wagner read Berlioz’s
Mémoires with considerable sympathy, and told his companion that the book had “strengthened his resolve never again to have anything to do with Paris.”
4 Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 1:217. Six months later, as we have mentioned, Wagner was writing his treatise on conducting—the first of any importance since Berlioz’s
L’Art du chef d’orchestre, the appendix to the second edition of the orchestration treatise
of 1855. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the French musician’s conspicuous absence from
Über das Dirigieren is a paradoxical sign of his presence in Wagner’s imagination. For years thereafter, Berlioz was a topic of conversation between Richard and Cosima: the latter’s diaries are filled with fascinating
aperçus—complimentary, critical, contradictory—regarding both the man and his music.
That music, Wagner knew well. It was presumably during his years in Dresden, when he amassed a considerable library, that Wagner began purchasing Berlioz’s published scores. By the end of his life, he possessed an impressive collection of first editions, as we know from the current Berlioz holdings in the Wagner museum at Wahnfried, which include the Symphonie fantastique, Harold en Italie, the Requiem, Roméo et Juliette (in both full score and in Théodore Ritter’s piano reduction), the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, La Damnation de Faust, the Te Deum, and the overtures Le Roi Lear, Benvenuto Cellini (in both full score and in Adolfo Fumagalli’s piano arrangement), and Le Carnaval romain. Wagner also possessed the Witzendorf edition of Liszt’s arrangement of the Symphonie fantastique, a first edition of the Mémoires (as we have seen), and the orchestration treatise translated by Alfred Dörffel and published in Leipzig in 1864 as Berlioz’s Instrumentationslehre.
The precise contents of Berlioz’s library have never come to light. The only works by Wagner that we may be certain were in his possession are Lohengrin, published in Leipzig in 1852 and offered to Berlioz in the following year, by the Polish Count Thadeus Tysczkiewicz, with a touching dedication—
Offert à Monsieur Hector Berlioz en souvenir de son passage par Francfort et comme témoignage de l’admiration la plus sincère et du plus profond respect.
—Thadée C
te Tyczkiewicz, 29.VIII.1853.
5 BnF, Musique, FS 21.—and Tristan, with which we opened this chapter. In Paris in 1860 Wagner offered the spanking new edition to Berlioz as a tribute to his colleague and rival whose work he had attempted to transcend and in the hope of winning both the French composer’s private affection and public approval of a radically new musical style. But Berlioz’s approval could never be purchased, not even by the gift of that priceless score. While he reacted in many favorable ways to parts of Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin, whose overture he considered a chef-d’œuvre, Berlioz could not find it in his heart—because he could not find it in his ear—to lavish praise upon Tristan, whose prelude, played at Wagner’s three concerts by the augmented orchestra of the Théâtre-Italien at the sale Ventadour, soon to become the most intensely scrutinized hundred measures in the entire musical canon, Berlioz simply failed to grasp.
What Berlioz wrote in reaction to the prelude—“I have read and reread this curious page; I have listened to it with scrupulous attention and with a sincere desire to discover its meaning; but alas, I must admit that I do not yet have the slightest idea of what the author was attempting to do”—has more than any other comment caused him to become known as one of Wagner’s detractors. But if we read and reread this sentence, we see that it is not mere disparagement, for the crucial words
pas encore (“not
yet”) suggest that Berlioz understood the possibility that the deficiency was, not Wagner’s, but
his. It is well to remember that the dissonances at the opening of the finale of the Ninth Symphony—hardly a work that the French composer abhorred—caused Berlioz to use a quite similar formula: “I have long sought the reason for this idea, but I am compelled to admit that it remains to me inexplicable.”
6 À travers chants, 76 (from the article appearing in the Revue et Gazette musicale of March 4, 1838). The balance of the article on Wagner deals with the so-called “music of the future.” Here, too, Berlioz’s objections, read coolly, are directed not so much at Wagner as at the “religion” of
la musique de l’avenir, to whose prophets he would say
non credo. Like Rossini, whose music Berlioz respected but whose proselytes he reproached, Wagner was for Berlioz a man to be reckoned with, the Wagnerians, men to be rebuffed. Furthermore, Berlioz would sometimes think of Wagner as a man more “of theory” than “of experience.” Like Edmund Burke, who because of their abstract theories objected to the leaders of the French Revolution,
7 Dunn, “Revolutionary Men of Letters,” 729–754. Berlioz, too, was by nature skeptical of theoretical programs—political as well as artistic.
Of the many aspects of this multidimensional relationship—almost all of the stories you might wish to tell can be told along with the story of Berlioz and Wagner—let me reiterate one that brings both artists together. This concerns the phenomenon that so impressed Berlioz on his initial encounter with
Rienzi and
Der fliegende Holländer—Wagner’s twofold authorship of the text and the music. The encounter surely added fuel to the fire that eventually led Berlioz, too, to compose his own librettos. In this way Berlioz was able to give his music “the first and final say,” as Katherine Kolb has persuasively written, “while simultaneously declaring the text so crucial that the composer alone could be relied on to do it justice.”
8 Kolb, “The Damnation of Faust,” 151. Would Richard Wagner have put it this way? In the eternal debate over the primacy of the one or the other, Wagner tended, at least in theory, to exclaim
prima la parole, dopo la musica. He diagnosed Berlioz’s problem as advocating the opposite, as we see in his letter to Liszt of September 8, 1852, with its analysis of the weakness of Berlioz’s
Benvenuto Cellini couched in explicit sexual imagery that a “new” musicologist might wish to pursue:
If ever a
musician needed
a poet,
it is Berlioz, and it is his misfortune that he always adapts his poet according to his own musical whim, arranging now Shakespeare, now Goethe, to suit his own purpose. He needs a poet to fill him through and through, a poet who is driven by ecstasy to violate him, and who is to him what man is to woman.
9 Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, 4:459; Wagner, Selected Letters, 268.It is true that the libretto of
Benvenuto Cellini,
like those of the dramatic symphony
Roméo et Juliette and the dramatic legend
La Damnation de Faust,
fails to rise to Goethean or Shakespearean heights. (
Les Troyens and
Béatrice et Bénédict were not yet written.) What is striking is Wagner’s “solution” to Berlioz’s “difficulty”: that he take over Wagner’s
own prose outline of the story of
Wieland der Schmied, the three-act mythical-legendary-Germanic-heroic opera sketched in the winter of 1849–1850 and abandoned by the Meister in favor of the Nibelungs
. We may find this ludicrously self-centered, because Berlioz, who contemplated setting many tales, was unlikely to warm to such a subject. But Wagner was perfectly serious. More droll, Wagner suggests that the French libretto of
Wieland be prepared by, of all persons, Henri Blaze. Now, it is not clear whether Wagner refers to Berlioz’s predecessor at the
Journal des débats,
the critic known as Castil-Blaze, or to his son, Henri Blaze de Bury. For Berlioz, both were incarnations of all that was wrong with French musical life—the former because of his arrangements of Mozart and Weber,
which for Berlioz were
dérangements and
castilblazades;
the latter because of his “De l’école fantastique de M. Berlioz,”
10 Revue des deux mondes (October 1, 1838). a misguided essay that itemized Berlioz’s “faults” in an insidious way that misinformed an entire generation. Wagner may have liked Berlioz, he may have admired and felt sympathy for him, but he did not
know him, contrary to what he explicitly claimed to Liszt, for no one who knew him could possibly have suggested that he traffic with a Blaze. Furthermore,
Wieland der Schmied,
as Jean-Jacques Nattiez has it, is an illustration of the thesis of Wagner’s
The Artwork of the Future regarding the relative importance of music and poetry in opera.
11 Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne, 76. Such a philosophical notion, to Berlioz, would have been unsuited for musical setting. None other than Adolf Hitler, however, believing himself skilled in music after a few months of piano lessons, thought otherwise.
12 Müller, “Wagner in Literature and Film,” 385. In fact a few of Hitler’s sketches for the opera, including a musical sketch set down by his friend August Kubizek, went on display at the Museum Niederösterreich Haus der Geschichte, in Sankt Pölten, near Vienna, in February 2020.
Wagner’s diagnosis of Berlioz’s operatic problem is not absurd, and it is regrettable, one might say with historical distance, that the two were unable to debate the issue in detail. “How unfortunate for me that you do not understand German,” Wagner wrote to Berlioz on September 6, 1855, recognizing that on that account he would always remain a stranger to the French composer. Throughout his lifetime Wagner was consumed with the question of “Was ist deutsch.” And because he saw his own music as “merely an illustration” of the German poem and the underlying poetic concept—the “poetische Entwürfe”
—he assumed that Berlioz would always be estranged from his music as well. Berlioz replied sympathetically, with humor, without linguistic chauvinism, without philosophical baggage: “In
true music, there are accents that require their particular words, and there are words that require their particular accents. To separate the one from the other, to give equivalents that are merely approximate, is to have a puppy suckled by a goat and vice versa.”
13 CG 5:151. The autograph of Berlioz’s letter (unavailable to the editors of CG), is preserved in the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth.