So persuasively did Berlioz represent love that “Roméo” opened the mind of Wagner, who was a decade younger and still several years from his breakthrough with “Der Fliegende Holländer.” David Cairns, the reigning authority on Berlioz, wrote that when Wagner heard the piece he was overwhelmed and felt that it revealed “till then unimagined possibilities of musical poetry.” What he received, Cairns added, “he would give back in ‘Tristan und Isolde.’”
If only Berlioz admired “Tristan” in turn. He once referred to it as a “chromatic moan.” Wagner, though, was just one of many composers on the receiving end of Berlioz’s barbed wit. He was a prolific critic, arguably the most brilliant, unsparing writer on music of his age. Of Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment” he wrote, “There is harmony, melody, rhythmic effects, instrumental and vocal combinations; it’s music, if you will, but not new music.” But he had an eye for young talent, championing Gounod, Saint-Saëns and Bizet early in their careers.
Berlioz also wrote a treatise on instrumentation. (One comment, about the English horn evoking memory and distance, would seem to describe Act III of “Tristan” decades before its premiere.) And he was shockingly modernist in the often hilarious “Evenings in the Orchestra,” a hybrid book of satire, memoir and science fiction, including an in-depth vision for a musical utopia called Euphonia, in the year 2344.
He was a reluctant critic, though, and saw himself less as a critic and more as a newspaper “feuilletonist.” He described the difference, resonant to this day, in his memoirs: Critics, he wrote, publish only when they really have something to say, “to illuminate some question, challenge some theory, bestow well-mannered praise or blame.” Feuilletonists, on the other hand, are assigned reviews, which means they often hold no strong opinions about what they cover, though they have to behave as if they did.
Berlioz saw workaday reviewing as nothing more than a source of income; much Parisian music around him, he thought, warranted neither his nor the public’s attention. “From time to time,” he wrote to his father, “I lose patience and crush two or three mediocrities in my fist.”
DESPITE THE POWER of his pen, Berlioz failed to shift public opinion about his own music. He continued to write innovative masterpieces: the pre-Mahlerian “Grande Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale”; the otherworldly “Grande Messe des Morts”; the dramatic yet defiantly symphonic “Damnation de Faust.” As Philip Glass and Steve Reich would a century later, Berlioz had his music performed mostly by gathering players and organizing concerts himself. He described a trip to Germany as “ruinous” because he traveled with 500 pounds of scores.
Read More: The World Is Still Catching Up to the Music of Hector Berlioz
