Note 1 — BERLIOZ, ROMANTIC AND CLASSIC

The reader who is interested in the matter may turn to letters to Liszt of 1852. Here he speaks slightingly of Berlioz's Cellini, and alludes to "the platitudes of his Faust Symphony(!)" The last phrase alone is sufficient to show that Wagner was completely ignorant of the work he had the impertinence to decry—for every one knows that Berlioz's Faust is not a symphony. In a recent article in The Speaker on "The Relations of Wagner and Berlioz," I have, I think, shown that Wagner could not have known a note either of the Faust or the Cellini; the dates of performance and of publication put any such knowledge on his part out of the question. It is necessary, however, to warn the reader that in both the English translation of the Wagner-Liszt letters (by Dr. Hueffer, revised by Mr. Ashton Ellis), and the big Glasenapp-Ellis Life of Wagner, the real facts are kept from the English public. The incriminating phrase, "Faust Symphony," is quietly abbreviated to "Faust," so that there is nothing to rouse the reader's suspicions and make him look further into the matter. In the big Life, again, now in course of publication, Mr. Ellis, though he has thousands of pages at his disposal—though, indeed, he can devote a whole volume of five hundred pages to two years of Wagner's life—still cannot find room for the brief line or two from the 1852 letter that would put the real facts before the reader; discreet and silent dots take their place. The British public is apparently to be treated like a child, and told only so much of the truth about Wagner as is thought to be good for it—or at any rate good for Wagner.