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Updated: June 15, 2025
Take him for all in all, he is an honest, splendid, tremendous fellow; and, together with your letter, I received one from Berlioz, in which he says amongst other things: "Wagner will, no doubt, tell you all about his stay in London, and what he has had to suffer from predetermined hostility. He is splendid in his ardour and warmth of heart, and I confess that even his violence delights me.
Madame Jeannin used often to speak of her grandfather, who adored the violoncello, and used to sing airs of Gluck, and Dalayrac, and Berton. There was a large volume of them in the house, and a pile of Italian songs. For the old gentleman was like M. Andrieux, of whom Berlioz said: "He loved Gluck." And he added bitterly: "He also loved Piccinni." Perhaps of the two he preferred Piccinni.
The explanations of "Lelio" so unmistakably pointed to the feeling of the composer for herself, that Miss Smithson, who by chance was present, could not be deceived, though she never yet had seen Berlioz. A few days afterward a benefit concert was arranged, in which Miss Smithson's troupe was to take part, as well as Berlioz, who was to direct a symphony of his own composition.
For, with them, music had on the whole a general timbre. Phrases which they assigned, say, to violins or flutes can be assigned to other instruments without doing the composition utter damage. But in the works of Berlioz music and instruments are inseparable. One cannot at all rearrange his orchestration.
Madame Alixe Delavigne was only a gracious memory to the sympathetic men passengers who hastened on to London via Mont Cenis, but the chattering gossips of the Rue Berlioz noted, with an eager Gallic curiosity, the return of the mysterious occupant of No. 9.
To enumerate all the celebrities then congregated in the British Metropolis would be beyond my power and the scope of this publication, but I must at least mention that among them was no less eminent a creative genius than Berlioz, no less brilliant a vocal star than Pauline Viardot-Garcia. Of other high-priests and high-priestesses of the art we shall hear in the sequel.
Among these works were "Lohengrin," "Rienzi," and "Tannhâuser" by Wagner, "Benvenuto Cellini" by Berlioz, and Schumann's "Genoveva," and music to Byron's "Manfred."
In 1841 it was again given in Paris, with an accurate translation of the text by Pacini, and recitatives added by Berlioz, as "Le Franc Archer." Its first English performance in London was given July 22, 1824, as "Der Freischütz, or the Seventh Bullet," with several ballads inserted; and its first Italian at Covent Garden, March 16, 1850, with recitatives by Costa, as "Il Franco Arciero."
It was for the versifiers. The theater is to poetry what the opera is to music. As Berlioz said: Sicut amori lupanar. And in the end they plumped heroically for Duty. Christophe could not see how Duty differed from sordid interest: but the public was satisfied. The word Duty was enough for them: they did not insist on having the thing itself; they took the author's word for it.
But it is chiefly in the "Requiem" that Berlioz revealed himself in all the grandeur and might of his being. For in it all the aristocratic coolness and terseness of "La Damnation de Faust" and of "Harold en Italie," all the fresco-like calm of "Les Troyens
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