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Updated: May 6, 2025
In their methods of treating the orchestra and the voices, in their musical architectonics, and in their conception of opera! In spite of the great worth of Les Troyens and Benvenuto Cellini, Berlioz shone brightest in the concert hall; Wagner is primarily a man of the theater.
They hissed its performance? Not at all; "they were merely indifferent" it is Berlioz who tells us this. It passed unnoticed. He died before he had seen Les Troyens played in its entirety, though it was one of the noblest works of the French lyric theatre that had been composed since the death of Gluck. But there is no need to be astonished. To hear these works to-day one must go to Germany.
He let loose throughout the opera the trombones which the author intentionally reserved for the end. Benoist ought to have refused to do such a barbarous piece of work. However, it had no effect in preventing the failure of a worthless piece, staged at great expense by the management which had rejected Les Troyens. I was fifteen when I entered Halévy's class.
Oh, mournful destiny! There are great men who have outlived their genius; but with Berlioz genius outlived desire. His genius was still there; one feels it in the sublime pages of the third act of Les Troyens
In 1847 Berlioz went to Russia and to England for the first time. In 1849 he began work on his "Te Deum"; in 1850 on "L'Enfance du Christ." The next years were spent in conducting. In 1854, on the death of his wife, he married Mlle. Récio. In 1856 we find Berlioz in North Germany, Brussels and London. He began the composition of "Les Troyens" the same year.
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
Berlioz showed clearly in Les Troyens his intention of approaching Gluck, while Wagner freely avowed his indebtedness to Weber, and particularly to the score of Euryanthe. He might have added that he owed something to Marschner, but he never spoke of that. The more we study the works of these two men of genius, the more we are impressed by the tremendous difference between them.
It seems to me that Strauss must have a secret affection for this work, which owes its inspiration to the undefinable impressions of convalescence. His fever fell asleep in it, and certain passages are full of the caressing touch of nature, and recall Berlioz's Les Troyens.
But this man who lived so wild and adventurous a life expressed his passions with delicacy; and one finds an almost girlish purity in the immortal love passages of Les Troyens or the "nuit sereine" of Roméo et Juliette. And compare this Virgilian affection with Wagner's sensual raptures. Does it mean that Berlioz could not love as well as Wagner?
I feel, but I cannot express what I feel. But this genius had other characteristics which are less well known, though they are not less unusual. The first is his sense of pure beauty. Berlioz's exterior romanticism must not make us blind to this. He had a Virgilian soul; and if his colouring recalls that of Weber, his design has often an Italian suavity. Wagner never had this love of beauty in the Latin sense of the word. Who has understood the Southern nature, beautiful form, and harmonious movement like Berlioz? Who, since Gluck, has recognised so well the secret of classical beauty? Since Orfeo was composed, no one has carved in music a bas-relief so perfect as the entrance of Andromache in the second act of Les Troyens
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