We know that Berlioz wished to cast a veil of secrecy over the existence of his Mémoires. The day before he sent the text to Liszt, May 21, 1855, he told his friend to acknowledge receipt of only the package, not the manuscript: “I will know what that means.” Three years later, in May 1858, he told his sister Adèle, with whom his second wife was in occasional contact, that in her letters she should never speak of the Mémoires—“ne me parle jamais de cela dans tes lettres.” And yet excerpts from the book had already begun to appear in Le Monde illustré: the first of thirty-five selections came out on February 13, 1858, the last, on September 10, 1859. The existence of Berlioz’s Mémoires was thus known to all with an interest in music.
Earlier, excerpts from what in the Mémoires became the Voyage en Russie were published in the monthly Magasin des demoiselles, from November 25, 1855, to April 25, 1856, although the latter articles, which I shall mention below, were not identified as constituting parts of the author’s autobiography. Years earlier, however, when Les Soirées de l’orchestre went on sale, in late November 1852, the publishers did include an explanatory note at the foot of the first page of Le Premier Opéra, the tale recounted in the first soirée. Here we learn that that story was originally published in the Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie (of 1844), that that book was out of print, and that the author had refused to permit a second edition because “all of the autobiographical material of this voyage” would be “used and completed by him in another, more important book” upon which he was “currently at work.” It would not have taken a rocket scientist to discern that the “more important book” was an autobiography. Furthermore, when Berlioz’s even earlier communication to John Ella of May 15, 1852, regarding the mysterious composition of La Fuite en Égypte, was published in The Musical Union, on May 18, 1852, and reprinted in Le Ménestrel on May 30, 1852, the editor announced that that boutade (explaining Berlioz’s proclamation of La Fuite as a product of a renaissance composer) was “a page torn from his previous life, a page borrowed from his future Mémoires.” In the end, this “page” appeared, not in Mémoires but, like “Le Droit de jouer en fa,” in Les Grotesques de la musique. Still, already in the spring of 1852, the secret existence of the Mémoires was not really a secret at all.
In chapter 51 [5], the fifth letter of the first Voyage musical en Allemagne that bisects the Mémoires, Berlioz speaks in detail of the concert he gave in Dresden on February 10, 1843. After praising the accomplished singing of Joseph Tichatschek, the great tenor who would create the roles of Rienzi and Tannhäuser, Berlioz tells of the difficulties he had in finding a proper singer for “Entre l’amour et le devoir,” Teresa’s cavatina from the premier tableau of Benvenuto Cellini: Maschinka Schubert came to the rescue and performed admirably. In the original version of this chapter, which appeared in the Journal des débats on September 12, 1843, we read—between the comment on Tichatschek and the comment on Cellini—another sentence: “Mademoiselle Recio, who happened to be in Dresden at the time, very graciously also consented to sing two romances with orchestra [Le Jeune Pâtre breton and La Belle voyageuse], for which the public gallantly paid her tribute.” This sentence also appears in Berlioz’s 1844 book, the Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie. By the time of the Mémoires, when the woman who “happened to be in Dresden” had become his second wife, Berlioz preferred entirely to exclude what had earlier been a playful deception.
The secrecy mentioned above is usually seen as designed to prevent Marie from learning of the existence of the book. In my view, this secrecy—which we also find in the letters that encompass the gestation of Les Troyens, and which is a natural product of any artist’s fear that the creative fire might be extinguished by the light of day—was designed rather more to prevent Marie from becoming exaggeratedly desirous of reading it. The female protagonists whose stories structure so much of the text—Estelle Dubeuf, who inspired the tales of his youth and old age; Harriet Smithson, who inflamed his passion for Shakespeare—left little place for Berlioz’s second wife. Marie was practical: she became Berlioz’s “homme d’affaires,” or business manager, at a time when it was important that he have one; yet, like Minna Wagner, Marie was criticized, with stereotypical misogyny, for being a hindrance to the “master.” Marie was also musically educated: the Dresden audience’s “galant” applause rewarded singing that was perhaps unexceptional but certainly not unprofessional. I have elsewhere defended Marie Recio against the negative press she has had for generations. She was present at the creation of Les Nuits d’été, as we have seen in chapter 6, and, at the beginning of her promising career as Marie Willès, she may well have acted as the composer’s muse. Still, her faithful companionship, which surely included her love of travel and adventure, never elicited from Berlioz the poetic prose in which he composed the tales of love and adventure that make up the Mémoires. Marie would have resented, not the book’s emotional account of Estelle in her teens and Harriet in her twenties, but the absence of any such page devoted to her. How I would love to discover Les Mémoires de Marie Recio, écrits par elle-même!