In an artist’s life sometimes wild tempests succeed each other with bewildering rapidity, and so it was with me about this time.

Hardly had I recovered from the successive shocks of Weber and Shakespeare, when above my horizon burst the sun of glorious Beethoven to melt for me that misty inmost veil of the holiest shrine in music, as Shakespeare had lifted that of poetry.

To Habeneck, with all his shortcomings, is due the credit of introducing the master he adored to Paris. In order to found the Conservatoire concerts, now of world-wide fame, he had to face opposition, abuse and irony, and to inspire with his own ardour a set of men who, not being Beethoven enthusiasts, did not see the force of slaving for poor pay at music that, to them, appeared simply eccentric.

Oh! the nonsense I have heard them airing on those miracles of inspiration and learning—the symphonies!

Even Lesueur—honest, but devoted to antiquated dogmas—stood aside with Cherubini, Päer, Kreutzer and Catel, until, one day, I swept him off to hear the great C minor symphony.

I told him it was his duty to know and appreciate personally such a notable fact as this revelation of a new and glorious style to us, the children of the old classicism.

Conscientiously anxious to judge fairly, he would not have me by to distract him, but shut himself up with strangers at the back of a box.

The symphony over, I hurried round to hear his verdict, and found him, with flushed face, striding up and down a passage.

“Ouf!” he cried, “let me get out; I must have air! It’s incredible! Marvellous! It has so upset and bewildered me, that when I wanted to put on my hat I couldn’t find my head. Let me go by myself. I will see you to-morrow.”

I felt triumphant, and took care to go round next day. We spoke of nothing but the masterpiece we had heard; yet he seemed to reply to my ravings rather constrainedly. Still I persevered, until, after dragging out of him another acknowledgment of his heart-felt appreciation, he ended, with a curious smile:

“Yes, it’s all very well; but such music ought not to be written.”

“No fear, dear master,” I retorted; “there will never be too much of it!”

Poor human nature! Poor master! How much regret, envy, narrow-mindedness; what a dread of the unknown and confession of incapacity lay beneath your words! “Such music should not be written,” because the speaker knows instinctively that he himself could never write it.

Thus do all great men suffer from their contemporaries.

Haydn said much the same of Beethoven, whom he called a great pianist.

Grétry of Mozart, who, he said, had put the statue in the orchestra and the pedestal on the stage.

Handel, who said his cook was more of a musician than Gluck.

Rossini, who vowed that Weber’s music gave him a stomach-ache.

But the antipathy of the two latter to Gluck and Weber I believe to be due to quite another reason—a natural inability in these two comfortable portly gentlemen to understand the point of view of the two men of heart and sensibility.

This deliberately obstinate attitude of Lesueur towards Beethoven opened my eyes to the utter worthlessness of his conservative tenets, and from that moment I left the broad, smooth road wherein he had guided my footsteps, for a hard and thorny way over hedges and ditches, hills and valleys. But I could not hurt the old man by my apostasy, so did my best to dissimulate my change of mind, and he only found it out long after, on hearing a composition I had never shewn him.

It was just at this time that I set out on my treadmill round as critic for the papers.

Ferrand, Cazalès and de Carné—well-known political names—agreed to start a periodical to air their views, which they called Révue Européenne, and Ferrand suggested that I should undertake the musical correspondence.

“But I can’t write,” I objected; “my prose is simply detestable. And, besides——”

“No, it is not,” said Ferrand; “have I not got your letters? You will soon be knocked into shape. Besides, we shall revise what you write before it is printed. Come along to de Carné and hear all about it.”

What a weapon this writing for the press would be wherewith to defend truth and beauty in art! So, ignorant of the web of fate I was throwing around my own shoulders, I smiled innocently and walked straight into the meshes.

I was likely to be diffident of my writing powers, for, once before, being furious at the attacks made upon Gluck by the Rossini faction, I asked M. Michaud, of the Quotidienne, to let me reply. He consented, and I said to myself, gaily:

“Now, you brutes, I have got you; I’ll smite you hip and thigh!”

But I smote no one and nothing.

My utter ignorance of journalism, of the ways of the world, of press etiquette and my untamed musical passions, landed me in a regular bog. My article went far beyond the bounds of newspaper warfare, and M. Michaud’s hair stood on end.

“But, my dear fellow, you know, I cannot possibly publish a thing like that. You are pulling people’s houses down about their ears. Take it back and whittle it down a bit.”

But I was too lazy and too disgusted, so there it ended.

This laziness of mine does not apply to composition, which comes naturally to me. Hour after hour I labour at a score, sometimes for eight hours at a time; no work is too minute, no pains too great.

Prose, however, is always a burden. Sometimes I go back eight or ten times to an article for the Journal des Débats; even a subject I like takes me at least two days. And what blots, what scrawls, what erasures! My first copy is a sight to behold.

Propped up by Ferrand, I wrote for the Révue Européenne appreciative articles on Beethoven, Gluck and Spontini that made a certain mark, and thus began my apprenticeship to the difficult and dangerous work that has taken such a fatal hold on my life.

Never since have I shaken myself free, and strangely diversified have been its influences on my career both in France and abroad.

XIII

AN ACADEMY EXAMINATION

The subject set is always a lyric scena, and by way of finding out whether the candidates have melody, dramatic force, instrumentation, and other knowledge necessary for writing such a scena, they are set down to compose a vocal fugue! Each fugue must be signed.

Next day the musical section of the Academy sits in judgment on the fugues, and, since some of the signatures are those of the Academicians’ pupils, this performance is not entirely free from the charge of partiality.

The successful competitors then have dictated to them the classical poem on which they are to work. It always begins this way:

or,

or,

or,

Armed with this inspiring effusion the young people are locked up in their little cells with pens, paper, and piano until their work is done.

Twice a day they are let out to feed, but they may not leave the Institute building. Everything brought in for their use is carefully searched lest outside help should be given, yet every day, from six to eight, they may have visitors and invite their friends to jovial dinners, at which any amount of assistance—verbal or written—might be given.

This lasts for twenty-two days, but anyone who has finished sooner is at liberty to go, leaving his manuscript—signed as before—with the secretary.

Then the grave and reverend signors of the jury assemble, having added to their number two members of any other section of the Institute—either engravers, painters, sculptors or architects—anything, in short, but musicians.

You see, they are so thoroughly competent to judge an art of which they know nothing.

There they sit and solemnly listen to these scenas boiled down on a piano. How could anyone profess to judge an orchestral work like that? It might do for simple old-fashioned music, but nothing modern—that is, if the composer knows how to marshal the forces at his command—could by any possibility be rendered on the piano.

Try the Communion March from Cherubini’s great Mass. What becomes of those long-drawn, mystical wind-notes that fill one’s soul with religious ecstasy; of those exquisitely interwoven flutes and clarinets to which the whole effect is due?

They have completely vanished, since the piano can neither hold nor inflate a sound.

Does it not follow, then, that the piano, by reducing every tone-character to one dead level, becomes a guillotine whereby the noblest heads are laid low and mediocrity alone survives?

Well! After this precious performance the prize is awarded, and you conclude that this is the end of it all?

Not a bit! A week later the whole thirty-five Academicians, painters and architects and sculptors and engravers on copper and engravers of medals all turn up to give the final verdict.

They do not shut out the six musicians, although they are going to judge music.

Again the pianists and the singers go through the compositions, then round goes the fatal urn, in order that the judgment of the previous week may be confirmed, modified, or reversed.

Justice compels me to add that the musicians return the compliment by going to judge the other arts, of which they are as blindly ignorant as are their colleagues of music.

On the day of the distribution of prizes the chosen cantata is performed by a full orchestra. It seems just a little late; it might have been more serviceable to get the orchestra before judgment—seeing that after this there is no repeal—but the Academy is inquisitive; it really does wish to know something about the work it has crowned. Laudable curiosity!

In my time there was an old doorkeeper at the Institute whose indignation at all this procedure was most amusing. It was his duty to lock us up and let us out, and, being also usher to the Academicians, he was on the inside track and made some very odd notes.

He had been a cabin boy, which at once enlisted my sympathies; for I always loved sailors, and can listen imperturbably to their long-winded yarns; no matter how far they wander from the point I am always ready with a word to set them right again.

We were the best of friends, Pingard and I. One day, talking of Syria, he mentioned Volney.

“M. le Comte,” he said, “was so good and easy-going that he always wore blue woollen stockings.”

But his respect for me became unbounded enthusiasm when I asked whether he knew Levaillant.

“M. Levaillant!” he cried, “Rather! One day at the Cape I was sauntering along, whistling, when a big sun-burnt man with a beard turned round on me. I suppose he guessed I was French from my whistle. Of course I whistle in French, monsieur.

“‘I say, you young rogue, you’re French?’

“‘I should say I was. Givet is my part of the country.’

“‘Oh, you are French?’

“‘Yes.’

“And he turned his back and strode off. You see I did know M. Levaillant!”

The good old boy made such a friend of me that he told me a lot he would not have dared to repeat to anyone else.

I remember a lively conversation with him the day I got the second prize.

We had a piece of Tasso set that year, towards the end of which the Queen of Antioch invokes the god of the Christians she has contemned. I had the impudence to think that, although the last section was marked agitato, this ought to be a prayer, and I wrote it andante. I was rather pleased with it on the whole.

When I got to the Institute to hear whether the painters and sculptors, and architects, and engravers of medals, and line-engravers had settled whether I were a good or bad musician, I ran against Pingard on the stairs.

“Well?” I asked, “what have they decided?”

“Oh, hallo, Berlioz! I am glad you have come. I was hunting for you.”

“What have I got? Do hurry up! First? Second? Nothing?”

“Oh, do wait; I’m all of a tremble. Will you believe you were only two votes short of the first prize?”

“The first I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s true, though. The second is all very well, but I call it beastly that you missed the first by two votes. I am neither a painter, nor a sculptor, nor an architect, so of course I know nothing about music, but I’ll be hanged if that God of the Christians of yours didn’t set my heart gurgling and rumbling to such a tune that if I had met you that minute I should have—have—stood you a drink!”

“Thanks awfully, Pingard. I admire your taste. But, I say—you have been on the Coromandel coast?”

“Yes, of course. Why?”

“To Java?”

“Yes, but——”

“Sumatra?”

“Yes.”

“Borneo?”

“Yes.”

“You are a friend of Levaillant?”

“I should think so. Hand in glove with him.”

“You know Volney?”

“The good Count with the blue woollen stockings? Certainly.”

“Very well, then, you must be a splendid judge of music.”

“But—why? How?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly how or why. But it seems to me that your title is just as good as that of the gentlemen who do judge. Tell me, though, what happened.”

“Oh, my goodness! It’s always the same old game. If I had thirty children, devil take me if one of them should be an artist of any sort. You see, I am on the inside track, and know how they sell their votes. It’s nothing but a blessed old shop. See here! Once I heard M. Lethière asking M. Cherubini for his vote for a pupil.”

“Don’t refuse, my dear fellow,” he said, “we are such old friends, and my pupil really has talent.”

“No, he shall not have my vote,” Cherubini answered. “He promised my wife an album of drawings that she wanted badly. He hasn’t even done her a single tree!”

“That’s rather too bad of you,” said M. Lethière. “I vote for your people, and you might vote for mine. Look here! I’ll do you the album myself. I can’t say more than that.”

“Ah, that’s another pair of boots. What is your pupil’s name and picture? I must not get muddled. Pingard, a pencil and paper!”

“They went off into the window corner and wrote something, then I heard the musician say—

“All right, I will vote for him.”

“Now, isn’t that disgusting? If I had had a son in the competition and they had played him a trick like that, wouldn’t it have been enough to make me chuck myself out of window?”

“Come, Pingard, calm down a bit and tell me about to-day.”

“Well, when M. Dupont had finished singing your cantata they began writing their verdicts, and I brought the hurn” (Pingard always would stick in that “h”). “There was a musician close by whispering to an architect, ‘Don’t give him your vote; he’s no good at all, and never will be. He is gone on that eccentric creature Beethoven, and we shall never get him right again.’ ‘Really!’ said the architect. ‘Yet—’ ‘Well, ask Cherubini. You will take his word, won’t you? He will tell you that Beethoven has turned the fellow’s head—’ I beg pardon,” said Pingard, breaking off his story, “but who is this M. Beethoven? He doesn’t belong to the Academy, and yet everyone seems to be talking of him.”

“No, no! He’s a German. Go on.”

“There isn’t much more. When I passed the hurn to the architect I saw that he gave his vote to No. 4 instead of to you. Suddenly one of the musicians said, ‘Gentlemen, I think you ought to know that, in the second part of the score we have just heard, there is an exceedingly clever and effective piece of orchestration to which the piano cannot do justice. This ought to be taken into consideration.’ ‘Don’t tell us a cock-and-bull story like that,’ cried another musician. ‘Your pupil has broken the rules and written two quick arias instead of one, and he has put in an extra prayer. We cannot allow rules to be set at nought like this; it would be establishing a precedent.’ ‘Oh, this is too ridiculous! What says the secretary?’ ‘I think that we might pardon a certain amount of licence, and that the jury should distinctly understand that passage that you say cannot be properly given by the piano.’ ‘No, no!’ cried Cherubini, ‘it’s all nonsense. There is no such clever piece of work. It is a regular jumble, and would be abominable for the orchestra.’

“Then on all sides rose the architects, painters, sculptors, etc., saying, ‘Gentlemen, for pity’s sake agree somehow! We can only judge by what we hear, and if you will not agree—’ And all began to talk at once, and it became distinctly a bore, so M. Régnault and two others marched out without voting. They counted the votes. You only got second prize.”

“Thanks, Pingard, but, I say—they manage things better at the Cape Academy, don’t they?”

“The Cape? Why, you know they have not got one. Fancy a Hottentot Academy!”

“Well then, Coromandel?”

“None there.”

“Java?”

“None either.”

“What, no Academy at all in the East? Poor Orientals!”

“They manage to get along pretty well without.”

“What outer barbarians!”

I bade the old usher good-bye, thinking what a blessing it would be if I could send the Academy to civilise Borneo.

Two years later the Prix de Rome was mine, but poor old Pingard was dead. It was a pity.

If he had heard my “Burning of the Palace of Sardanapalus” he might have stood me ... two drinks!

XIV

FAUST—CLEOPATRA

Again I relapsed into my habitual gloom and indolence. Like a dead invisible planet I circled round that radiant sun that alas! was doomed so soon to fade into mournful oblivion.

Estelle, star of my dawn, was eclipsed and lost in the noontide brilliance of her mighty rival—my overwhelming and glorious love.

Although I took care never to pass the theatre, never willingly to look at Othelia’s portraits in the shop windows, yet still I wrote—receiving never a sign in reply. My first letters frightened her, and she bade her maid take her no more.

The company was going to Holland, and its last nights were advertised. Still I kept away; to see her again was more than I could bear.

However, hearing that she was to act two scenes from Romeo and Juliet with Abbott, for the benefit of Huet, the actor, I had a sudden fancy to see my own name on a placard beside that of the great actress.

I might be successful under her very eyes!

Full of this childish notion I got permission from the manager and conductor of the Opéra Comique to add an overture of my own to the programme.

On going to rehearsal I found the English company just finishing; broken-hearted Romeo held Juliet in his arms. At sight of the group I gave a hoarse, despairing cry and wringing my hands wildly, I fled from the theatre. Juliet saw and heard me; terror-stricken she pointed me out to those around, begging them to beware of the gentleman with the wild eyes.

An hour later I went back to an empty theatre. The orchestra assembled and my overture was run through—like a sleep walker I listened, hearing nothing—when the performers applauded me I wondered vaguely whether Miss Smithson would like it too! Fool that I was!!

It seems impossible that I could, even then, have been so ignorant of the world as not to know that, be the overture what it may, at a benefit, no one in the audience listens. Still less the actors, who only arrive in time for their turns and trouble themselves not at all about the music.

My overture was well played, fairly received—but not encored—Miss Smithson heard nothing of it and left next day for Holland.

By a strange chance (I could never get her to believe it was chance) I had taken lodgings at 96 Rue de Richelieu, opposite her house. Worn out, half dead, I lay upon my bed until three the next afternoon; then, rising, I crawled wearily to the window.

Cruel Fate! At that very minute she came out and stepped into her carriage en route for Amsterdam.

Was ever misery like mine?

Oh God! my deadly, awful loneliness; my bleeding heart! Could I bear that leaden weight of anguish, that empty world; that hatred of life; that shuddering shrinking from impossible death?

Even Shakespeare has not described it; he simply counts it, in Hamlet, the cruellest burden left in life.

Could I bear more?

I ceased to write; my brain grew numb as my suffering increased. One power alone was left me—to suffer.

To Humbert Ferrand.

Another landmark in my life was the reading of Goethe’s Faust; I could not lay it down, but read and read and read—at table, in the streets, in the theatres.

Although a prose translation, songs and rhymed pieces were scattered throughout, and these I set to music, then, without having heard a note of them, was crazy enough to have them engraved. A few copies, under the title of Eight Scenes from Faust were sold in Paris, and one fell into the hands of M. Marx, the great Berlin critic, who wrote most kindly to me about it. This unexpected encouragement from such a source gave me real pleasure, particularly as the writer did not dwell too much on my many and great faults. I know some of the ideas were good, since I afterwards used them for the Damnation de Faust, but I know, also, how hopelessly crude and badly written they were. As soon as I realised this, I collected and burnt all the copies I could lay hands on.

Under Goethe’s influence I wrote my Symphonie Fantastique—very slowly and laboriously in some parts, incredibly quickly and easily in others. The Scène aux Champs worried me for three weeks, over and over again I gave it up, but the Marche au Supplice was dashed off in a single night. Of course they were afterwards touched and retouched.

Bloc, being anxious that my new symphony should be heard, suggested that I should be allowed to give a concert at the Théâtre des Nouveautés.

The directors, attracted by the eccentricity of my work, agreed, and I invited eighty performers to help, in addition to Bloc’s orchestra. On my making enquiries about accommodation for such an army of executants the manager replied, with the calm assurance of ignorance:

“Oh, that’s all right. Our property man knows his business.” The day of rehearsal arrived, and so did my hundred and thirty musicians—with nowhere to put them!

I just managed to squeeze the violins into the orchestra, and then arose an uproar that would have driven a calmer man than myself out of his senses. Cries for chairs, desks, candles, strings, room for the drums, etc., etc. Scene shifters tore up and down improvising desks and seats, Bloc and I worked like sixty—but it was all useless; a regular rout; a passage of the Bérésina.

However Bloc insisted on trying two movements to give the directors some idea of the whole. So, all in a muddle, we struggled through the Ball Scene and the Marche au Supplice, the latter calling forth frantic applause.

But my concert never came off. The directors said that “they had no idea so many arrangements were necessary for a symphony.” Thus my hopes were dashed, and all for want of a few desks. Since then I always look into the smallest details for myself.

Wishing to console me for this disappointment, Girard, conductor of the Théâtre Italien, asked me to write something shorter than my unlucky symphony, that he could have carefully performed at his theatre.

I therefore wrote a dramatic fantasia with choruses on the Tempest, but no sooner did he see it than he said:

“This is too big for us; it must go to the opera.”

Without loss of time I interviewed M. Lubbert, director of the Royal Academy. To my relief and delight, he at once agreed to have it played at a concert for the Artists’ Benevolent Fund that was to take place shortly. My name was known to him through my Conservatoire concert, and he had seen notices of me in the papers. He, therefore, believed in me, put me through no humiliating examination, gave me his word, and kept it religiously.

All went splendidly at rehearsal; Fétis did his best for me, and everything seemed to smile, when, with my usual luck, an hour before the concert there broke over Paris the worst storm that had been known for fifty years. The streets were flooded and practically impassable, and during the first half of the concert, when my Tempest—damned tempest!—was being played, there were not more than three hundred people in the place.

Extracts from Letters to H. Ferrand.

Once more came June, and with it my third attempt on the Prix de Rome. This time I really did hope, for not only had I gained a second prize, but I heard that the musical judges thought well of me.

Being over-confident I reasoned (falsely, as it turned out), “Since they have decided to give me the prize, I need not bother to write exactly in the style that suits them; I will compose a really artistic cantata.”

The subject was Cleopatra after Actium. Dying in convulsions, she invokes the spirits of the Pharaohs, demanding—criminal though she be—whether she dare claim a place beside them in their mighty tombs. It was a magnificent theme, and I had often pondered over Juliet’s—

which is, at least in terror of approaching death, analogous to the appeal of the Egyptian Queen.

I was fool enough to head my score with those very words—the unpardonable sin to my Voltairean judges—and wrote what seemed to me a weird and dramatic piece, well suited to the words. I afterwards used it, unchanged, for the Chorus of Shades in Lelio; I think it deserved the prize. But it did not get it. None of the compositions did. Rather than give it to a “young composer of such revolutionary tendencies” they withheld it altogether.

Next day I met Boïeldieu, who, on seeing me, said:

“My dear boy, what on earth possessed you? The prize was in your hand, and you simply threw it away.”

“But, monsieur, I really did my best.”

“That’s just it! Your best is the opposite of your good. How could I possibly approve? I, who like nice gentle music—cradle-music, one might say.”

“But, monsieur, could an Egyptian queen, passionate, remorseful, and despairing, die in mortal anguish of body and soul to the sound of cradle-music?”

“Oh, come! come! I know you have plenty of excuses, but they go for nothing. You might at least have written gracefully.”

“Gladiators could die gracefully, but not Cleopatra. She had not to die in public.”

“There! you will exaggerate so! No one expects her to dance a quadrille. Why need you introduce such odd, queer harmonies into that invocation? I am not well up in harmony, and I must own that those outlandish chords of yours are beyond me.”

I bit my lip, not daring to make the obvious reply:

“Is it my fault that you know no harmony?”

“And then,” he went on, “why do you introduce a totally new rhythm in your accompaniments? I never heard anything like it.”

“I did not understand, monsieur, that we were not to try new modes if we were fortunate enough to find the right place for them.”

“But, my dear good fellow, Madame Dabadie is a capital musician, yet one could see it took all her care and talent to get her through.”

“Really, monsieur, I have yet to learn that music can be sung without either talent or care.”

“Well, well! you will have the last word. But do be warned for next year. Come and see me and we will talk it over like French gentlemen.”

And, chuckling over the point he had made (for his last words were a quotation from his own Jean de Paris), he walked off.

Yes, Boïeldieu was right. The Parisians liked soothing music, even for the most dramatic and harrowing situations. Pretty, innocent, gentlemanly music, pleasant and making no demand upon one’s deepest feelings.

Later on they wanted something different, and now they do not know what they want, or rather they want nothing at all. Ah me! what was the good God thinking of when He dropped me down in this pleasant land of France?

Yet I love her whenever I can forget her idiotic politics. How gay she is, how dainty in wit, how bright in retort—how she boasts and swaggers and humbugs, royally and republicanly! I am not sure, though, that this last is amusing.

XV

A NEW LOVE

To Ferdinand Hiller.

To H. Ferrand.