Chapter Nine: Berlioz and Wagner

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.

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.

It was in London, in the spring of 1855, when Berlioz was engaged as conductor to the New Philharmonic Society, and Wagner to the Old, that they had their closest meeting of minds. Writing on the day before Wagner’s final concert, which took place on Monday, June 25, 1855, the Frenchman told their mutual friend that he was deeply moved by even Wagner’s passionate outbursts (“ses violences”),2 CG 5:116. while his own gift for self-dramatization was usually more apparent in writing. Wagner tended to take his vantage point at the top of the mountain; Berlioz, at the edge of the grave. After that last concert, on that very Monday evening, Berlioz, Marie, and five other friends went to see the German master in his rooms in London. All seem to have engaged in lively conversation, drunk plenty of champagne punch, and eventually departed, after effusive embraces all around, at three o’clock in the morning.

How did the maestri converse? One witness, Ferdinand Praeger—whose book on Wagner remains controversial but whose observations on this occasion ring true (Wagner confirmed Praeger’s presence at the soirée in a letter to his wife),3 Wagner to Minna, June 26, 1855, in Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, 7:233. tells us that “Berlioz was reserved, self-possessed, and dignified,” and that his “clear, transparent delivery was as the rhythmic cadence of a fountain,” while “Wagner was boisterous, effusive, and his words leaped forth as the rushing of a mountain torrent.”4 Praeger, Wagner as I Knew Him, 94. Wagner’s gift for self-dramatization was clearly manifest in person, and Berlioz found him full of enthusiasm, warmth, and heartfelt emotion. When Wagner, in London, was presented to Queen Victoria, he spoke to her, and she to him, in German. In Berlioz’s company, he obviously spoke French.

What did they talk about on that Monday evening in London? Women? In the presence of Marie Recio and Madame Praeger, this is unlikely. Furthermore, Wagner was or would become in this arena what one would have to call a connoisseur, while Berlioz would remain an amateur. Birds? Like Flaubert and Courbet, Berlioz had a pet parrot at one time or another, and so, too, did Wagner.5 CG 5:552; and Wagner, My Life, 267. (Later, in 1878, Wagner chose “Berlioz” as the name of a pet rooster.)6 Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 2:1042–1043. Critics? Berlioz pilloried the leading Parisian critic of the eighteen-twenties and thirties, F.-J. Fétis, in his mélologue, Le Retour à la vie; Wagner lampooned the leading Viennese critic of the eighteen-sixties, Eduard Hanslick, in a (not-final) version of the libretto of Die Meistersinger. Both composers did so under the rubric of comic relief, but both critics reacted with whatever is the opposite of good humor.

Did they talk about Jews? Among others, Dieter Borchmeyer has argued that Wagner’s anti-Jewish sentiments were in origin French, not German, and were conspicuously stirred during his first, celebratedly miserable sojourn in Paris by the sometimes open hostility expressed by such friends of Berlioz as Vigny and Balzac, and by the writings of some of the early socialists, among them Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose Qu’est-ce que la propriété? Wagner is known to have read.7 Borchmeyer, “The Question of Anti-Semitism,” 178. Berlioz, who was never tempted by antisemitism, would presumably hear nothing of Wagner’s animadversions contra Meyerbeer, with whom the French composer long remained on perfectly cordial terms, to say nothing of other Jewish artists, such as Heine and Mendelssohn, whom Berlioz unfailingly admired. Wagner’s most heinous essay, Das Judentum in der Musik, first published in Franz Brendel’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in September 1850, appeared almost immediately in French translation, in La France musicale, of which we know Berlioz was a reader: the editors, Léon and Marie Escudier, regularly publicized and reviewed his concerts in around mid-century. It is not impossible that Berlioz saw the essay, here entitled “Les Juifs musiciens,” but it is unlikely that he would have known the identity of the author, who long remained anonymous.8 Bloom, “The French Text of Wagner’s Das Judentum,” 263–283.

Did they talk about conducting? This is a point of critical importance, for the two men’s opposite approaches set the stage for much future interpretive debate (Wagner conducted from memory, freely; Berlioz conducted from score, strictly—although, if Ferdinand Hiller is to be believed, with enormous, even excessive, energy).9 Hiller, Künstlerleben, 98. The young pianist-conductor Karl Klindworth, among the guests, would have lent an ear to such a discussion, but in the competitive circumstances that prevailed in London in 1855, when the principal critics, James William Davison of the Times and Henry Chorley of the Athenaeum, were more in Berlioz’s camp than in Wagner’s, the subject was probably too hot to handle. The treatise on conducting that Wagner began in the year of Berlioz’s death and published first in installments, in the press, in 1870, makes no mention of the French composer, but Über das Dirigieren surely owes something to the Berliozian model, the Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, likewise first published in installments, in the press, in 1841–1842, and many years later “Wagnerized” by that great Wagnerian who was Richard Strauss. Had Berlioz and Wagner spoken about orchestration itself, the French composer would surely have emphasized, as he does in the Mémoires, that of that art, his teachers, Jean-François Lesueur and Anton Reicha, taught him nothing at all.10 Mémoires, 194. Wagner might conceivably have admitted, by that time, that he had learned a thing or two from… Berlioz.

Did they talk about violinists? Wagner’s host and concertmaster, Prosper Sainton, was of the company. Perhaps they talked about tremolo, which both composers were accused of abusing. Or about oboe players! This is not as silly as it sounds, for Wagner’s former oboist in Dresden, Rudolf Hiebendahl, was at precisely that moment applying legal pressure to obtain repayment of a loan he had made to the composer some ten years earlier.11 Wagner to Wilhelm Fischer, June 4, 1855; Sämtliche Briefe 7:196–197. Berlioz could not have forgotten this fellow, for it was he who had spoiled the Scène aux champs, by adding trills and grace-notes to the off-stage solo that opens the third movement of the Fantastique, when Berlioz gave the work in Dresden in 1843. Warned against executing such melodic niceties, Hiebendahl refrained from doing so at the rehearsals, but let loose again at the concert, knowing that in the presence of the King, Berlioz could not punish such perfidiousness.12 Journal des débats (September 12, 1843); taken over in Mémoires, 544.

Did they talk about the piano? Berlioz seems always to have had one—he had purchased a spinet in his student days in the eighteen-twenties, and we long thought, because of the composer’s effusive but imprecise thanks, that Pierre Érard had made to him the gift a rosewood grand piano, in 1851.13 Because there is no record of it in the Érard archives, Robert Adelson, author of Érard: A Passion for the Piano (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), is certain (in private correspondence) that no such gift was made to Berlioz. (Madame Érard bestowed such a gift upon Wagner, in 1858.) In fact, Marie Recio had purchased an Érard grand piano, in 1847, and that is presumably the piano that Berlioz enjoyed until the end of his life. Neither Berlioz nor Wagner composed at the instrument. Berlioz was no pianist—he appears to have withdrawn his candidacy for the post of professor of harmony at the Conservatoire, in 1838, on learning that the teaching of practical keyboard accompaniment was a sine qua non14 AnF, F21 1292 (the folder of Paul-Émile Bienaimé).—although he sometimes plunked out a few notes. Wagner was no soloist, but he did use the piano to test what he had composed at his desk.15 Bailey, “The Method of Composition,” 273.

Did they talk about books? Both men were avid readers: Berlioz seems to have preferred literature; Wagner, history and philosophy. To understand the sources of Wagner’s inspiration we must read Feuerbach and Schopenhauer; to plumb the wellsprings of Berlioz’s imagination, we must plunge into Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Vigny, to say nothing of Virgil and Molière, whose work he knew by heart. One book is certain to have popped into the conversation, Les Soirées de l’orchestre, because on June 23, 1855, Berlioz wrote to his publisher, Michel Lévy, to ask that he send a copy of that book, now in its third printing, to Wagner’s address in Zurich.16 CG 5:115 (where the letter, whose autograph became available in October 2020, is incorrectly dated). Years later, Cosima and Richard mentioned the book when chattering, in Wahnfried, on March 24, 1879.17 Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 2:282.

We can be fairly sure that Berlioz and Wagner talked about Beethoven—hoping individually to gain by the comparison—and we can be sure that they talked about Liszt, that great mid-century friend and advocate of both. A reading of Berlioz’s letter to Liszt of June 25, 1855, and of Wagner’s letter to Liszt of July 5 of that year, offers proof that the two mighty artists had had a truly gratifying exchange. Berlioz writes that “on his word of honor” (as though in some way hoping to reassure Liszt), “I believe that [Wagner] loves you every bit as much as I do, myself.” Wagner, reporting ten days later, admits that he had discovered a Berlioz quite different from the one he had earlier imagined—a veritable “Leidensgefährte,” a companion in misfortune.

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:

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—

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:

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.

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.