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Updated: June 8, 2025
Among Berlioz's later works was an opera of which he had composed both words and music, consisting of two parts, "The Taking of Troy," and "The Trojans at Carthage," the latter of which at last secured a few representations at a minor theatre in 1863. The plan of this work required that it should be carried out under the most perfect conditions.
To continue the record of Berlioz's life in consecutive narrative would be without significance, for it contains but little for many years except the same indomitable battle against circumstance and enmity, never yielding an inch, and always keeping his eyes bent on his own lofty ideal.
The reading of the score of Berlioz's Requiem makes it appear singularly old-fashioned, but this is true of most of the romantic dramas, which, like the Requiem, show up better in actual performance. It is easy to rail at the vehemence of the Romanticists, but it is not so easy to equal the effect of Hernani, Lucrèce Borgia and the Symphonie fantastique on the public.
Berlioz's work did not spread itself evenly over his life; it was accomplished in a few years. It was not like the course of a great river, as with Wagner and Beethoven; it was a burst of genius, whose flames lit up the whole sky for a little while, and then died gradually down. Let me try to tell you about this wonderful blaze.
In Berlioz's Mémoires you can read about the enthusiasm, the tears, and the feeling, that the performances of Gluck's and Spontini's operas aroused; and in the same book one sees clearly that this musical warmth lasted until 1840, after which it died down little by little, and was succeeded by complete musical apathy in the second Empire an apathy from which Berlioz suffered cruelly, so that one may even say he died crushed by the indifference of the public.
Berlioz's "Dramatic Legend," entitled "La Damnation de Faust," tricked out with stage pictures by Raoul Gunsbourg, was performed as an opera at Monte Carlo in 1903, and in New York at the Metropolitan and Manhattan opera-houses in the seasons 1906-1907 and 1907-1908, respectively; but the experiment was unsuccessful, both artistically and financially.
You are quite right, dearest friend, if you attribute the weakness of Berlioz's mode of working to the poem, and my opinion perfectly coincides with yours on this point; but you have been erroneously led to believe that Berlioz is rewriting his "Cellini."
The thinness of much of his work, the feebleness of the overture to "Benvenuto Cellini," for instance, results from his inexperience in the new tongue. But he had not to practise long. It was not long before he became the teacher of his very contemporaries. Wagner owes as much to Berlioz's instrumentation as he owes to Chopin's harmony. But for the new men, he is more than teacher.
His last quartets are descriptive symphonies of his soul, and very differently carried out from Berlioz's symphonies. Wagner was able to analyse one of the former under the name of "A Day with Beethoven."
She returned with Berlioz's Memoirs, Pater's Imaginary Portraits, and Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. "I suppose these books belong to Ulick. I don't know if I ought to take them." "I cannot advise you; you must do as you like. I suppose you'll bring them back?" "Oh, yes, of course I shall bring them back." "Evelyn, dear, is it quite essential that you should go?"
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