Near the end of the love scene in act 2, Tristan and Isolde entreat the love-night (
Liebesnacht) to bring about their love-death (
Liebestod)—the desired fruit of their love-passion (
Liebeslust—the last word of the scene). Because German loves
Liebes-compounds, let us choose
Liebesangst to represent Wagner’s feelings about Berlioz. The gift of
Tristan was no doubt a display of affection. But it is also possible to see it as a demonstration of anxiety, which he earlier expressed candidly to Liszt, and which resulted in part from what he perceived as his linguistic inadequacy: “I am afraid of Berlioz; with my horrible French, I am simply lost.”
1 Wagner to Liszt, October 7, 1853; Sämtliche Briefe, 5:425. The psychological state in which Wagner encountered Berlioz was manifest in his larger encounter with the French nation, which now he would adopt, now he would defeat. (A recent doctoral dissertation studies the encounter at length and in detail.)
2 Le Hir, “Wagner et la France (1830–1861).” How curious that, unlike Berlioz’s later reception (warm abroad, mixed in France, everywhere free from ideological excess), Wagner’s afterlife—from the time of Nietzsche to the time of the Holocaust and beyond—should become an incarnation of
Liebesangst itself.
Was Berlioz anxious about the rise of Wagner? In her own highly imaginative study of the relationship I have discussed here, Katherine Kolb demonstrated how much of Berlioz’s later criticism, especially that included in his final compendium,
À travers chants, is overtly or covertly directed at Wagner.
3 Kolb, “Flying Leaves,” 25–61. The French composer resented his displacement at the Opéra by Wagner and
Tannhäuser, he reproved the chromaticism of
Tristan,
he rejected excessive theorizing, he never doubted the rightness of his own cause: “Music is free” (I quoted Berlioz’s dictum in chapter 7); “it does what it wants—and without permission.”
4 Archives de l’Académie des Sciences; quoted in Bloom, “Berlioz à l’Institut Revisited,” 196–197. He could not have known, in the eighteen-sixties, that that excessive theorist, who most of the time believed that his music was the servant of his words, would for a century and beyond loom over the musical world, a burning object of both worship and worry, as “the most widely influential figure in the history of music.”
5 Blurb at us-macmillan.com for Ross, Wagnerism.